The Garden Life and Times of Justin Husher

CLEVO URBAN FARM MANIFESTO DISTRO

2012-03-01T13:46:00.007-05:00

The West Side Melt will be carrying both Urban Farm Manifestos and "A Farm in Cleveland?!" t-shirts throughout the month of March. I'm looking forward to the chicken fried steak melt on Saturday night!

The perpetual givers at Root Cafe are stocked with 20 copies as of today.

One of my favorite record stores in the entire world, My Mind's Eye, has a few.

Visible Voice Books in Tremont At this point, distribution is obviously slanted towards Cleveland and its West Side. However, I'm looking to get the Manifesto into other cities, the East Side, and some Internet distribution. If anybody has any leads on cool independent bookshops or food co-ops, please be in touch. I'm particularly seeking help in Columbus, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Louisville, and all points in between. Thanks.

FUEL FILLUP PICKUP PARTY aka the URBAN FARM MANIFESTO OPENING PARTY

2012-02-27T22:33:00.013-05:00

You know you've gone to a Manifesto opening party when you see this sign. Visible Voice Books Merch Table Pre-party. Pre-party Urban Farm Manifesto Manuscript 1. Pre-party Urban Farm Manifesto Manuscript 2. This is my favorite photo of the evening. This is my favorite non-people based photo of the evening. Courtesy of Anna Wallace Birchler, as are most of the rest of the others in this blog. This is my favorite crowd photo. First, we got Urban Farm Manifesto artiste extraordinaire, Gabriel Bond completely shunning the camera. Somebody told me that he was grumbling something about, "no pictures, no pictures." Second, immediately to the right of Gabe's right shoulder is Chuck.

Chuck told me a funny little story that went something like this (completely paraphrased). I never heard of ya, til about 10 this morning when somebody sent me the video. Then like five minutes later you walked into the Root Cafe. You were getting cups or something. And I recognized ya cause of the shorts. YESSS!!!

To the right of Chuck, is Farmer Dan in the Pennsylvania River Woman Mustard-colored hat. He is definitely enjoying that sweet potato donut with Ohio Maple Syrup glaze! In the foreground directly south, we got Ms. Perkins, who is standing pretty in pink, and her crew, Maria and Paul. The little poof of a white cloud chef's hat is Adam Hughes.

The redneck-lookin' dude in the camo hat is Root Cafe's owner, Bobbie. He rode his bike in the only snowstorm of 2012 for this thing! And last but not least at the end of the right of the page is Manifesto Brewmaster and Sofa King Killer Micro-coffee bean Roaster, Aaron Pearl, representing his own bad self and Origins Beanery.

So going back to Gabriel Bond as our focal point. Immediately to his left is LEAF Queenpin, Annie with a more German last name than thou. To Annie's left, methinks is Rob Burgoyne, who happens to be the LEAF Kingpin. Just below the LEAF folk is Ron Kretsch, who I just appreciated for showing up, but then he also bought a Manifesto. Thank you, Ronk! In the bottom left corner is Rob Resch; he'll fix your amp.

Urban Farm Manifesto Artist, Gabriel Bond getting all snarky. I like this photo because there's two dudes eating donuts. I like this photo because I don't know most of the people in it. Vegan Sweet Potato Donuts in Action! We made sure no kids got anywhere near the fryer. A good friend, farmhand, rocker, and masseuse, I call this one, "Jessica and Justin." I had no idea Tunnel Vision Hoop Founder, Todd Alexander is this tall. My marketing department should have never allowed me to take this photo. Birch on the beer. Aaron looking elsewhere. Maria and Chef Hughes on the sweet potato, one and twos. At the end of the evening beyond all the people folk who literally published the Urban Farm Manifesto. Mucho thanks goes out to these peeps: Ed Sotelo for hooking up the event. Visible Voice for hosting. Zappitelli's for all the delicious pizza. Adam Hughes for always coming through. Rockethub for the infrastructure. Origins Beanery for the Manifesto Strong Ale. And power fueler, Sarah Buck, who contributed majorly to the wine tab. Now for distribution!

Fuel Fillup Pickup Party Prep

2012-02-20T16:06:00.003-05:00

Just because the Manifesto has been to the presses and back, doesn't mean I've been sitting around unmanifesto-ing. In fact, the contrary is true. I always thought I'd be handnumbering a seven inch or LP at this point in my life, but instead, my first jaunt at handnumbering comes with this Urban Farm Manifesto. I'm glad I got it over with when the adrenalin from the Jakprints pickup was still flooding my emotions because the physical act of handnumbering 500 copies isn't as cool as it sounds. And I'm sorry if it got a little sloppy.

Numbers 1-100 are the black 180 gram vinyl edition and come in black sharpie. Numbers 101-200 are the Sarah edition in turquoise sharpie. 201-300 are the Monsatan edition and come in red sharpie. 301-400 are the green edition in green sharpie. 401-500 are the Old as Dirt edition in brown sharpie.

Besides handnumbering, I've been ripping five-count stacks of Corporate Food Still Sucks sticker packs. I've sweated over (but not into) boiling vats of Pennsylvania River Woman Mustard, the Manifesto Edition. I've bought a gallon of Ohio Maple Syrup for the Ohio Maple Syrup Glaze for the vegan sweet potato donuts. And the Manifesto Strong Ale has been bottled and is currently in the process of the bottle fermentation thing.

Still on the "Prep To Do" list are sweet potato material acquisition and figuring out what we're pouring the beer into; though methinks, we're using half pint canning jars. If anybody knows where to get Cleveland sweet potatoes or even Ohio sweet potatoes right now, please let me know. Then Tomorrow or Wednesday, I think I'm doing an Urban Farm Manifesto podcast (whatever that is) with this fella named Doctor Fermento.

Only three days left on the Rockethub pre-sale. Don't be shy.

http://www.rockethub.com/projects/5451-old-husher-s-urban-farm-manifesto

GOAL ACHIEVED! PRE-SALE STILL ON!

2012-02-02T10:02:00.003-05:00

In eight furious days of crowdfunding, the Urban Farm Manifesto was able to achieve its stated goal of $900! That's pretty amazing, and I thank the diverse group of friends, strangers, and family, who've contributed to the success of the Rockethub campaign.

That being said, the price tag on this entire project including artists' fees, marketing, printing, and Ohio Maple Syrup is $2,100. I absolutely have no problem footing the rest of the $1,200. I believe in this project 101% and would have paid for the entire thing, if necessary.

What I do mind is holding inventory. So far, I still have 478 units of Manifesto unaccounted for, 97 limited edition posters awaiting walls, and nine jars of Pennsylvania River Woman Mustard looking to be slathered on sandwiches. Therefore, pre-sale is still on!

From Where I Could Use Help

Though, I'll take a rocket fueling where I can get it. There are a couple of generalized groups whose support I'd like to see. These are my Coastal Peeps and Cleveland's Policy People.

Coastal Peeps

I know out of sight is out of mind, but I'd like to see some more fuelings from my folks all up and down the West Coast and Brooklyn. Though land is much more affordable in the Midwest, the zoning/sales/bureaucracy issues are the same whether it's Cleveland or Berkley. Thanks again to Scot Pansing for being the first coastal fueler.

Cleveland's Policy People

This is a huge group of traditionally tight-moneyed people in the governmental sector and private non-profit sector, whose general jobs are to promote all things green like urban farms and sustainability. Personally, I think every one of them should pre-order a SUPER COMBO, consisting of "A Farm In Cleveland?!" t-shirt and an Urban Farm Manifesto.

So far, though emails have been sent to the Office of Sustainability, Neighborhood Progress Inc, and the Cuyahoga County branch of the OSU Extension Office about the Manifesto, no individuals within these groups (or the groups themselves) have contributed. Tomorrow's payday and maybe I'm being hasty. I would really love to eat my words on this one and owe all of Cleveland's Policy People an apology. I wish I could conclude with a name-dropping "thank you" right now, but I literally can't.

Therefore and to re-iterate, pre-sale is still on! Thank you. http://rockethub.com/projects/5451-old-husher-s-urban-farm-manifesto

THE URBAN FARM MANIFESTO AND ROCKETHUB

2012-02-01T07:53:00.006-05:00

It definitely appears that some of you have already taken notice, but for good measure, please checkout the video. I'm well on my way to my financial goal of $900. However, I am a far cry from my per unit sales goal of 100 units (so far 18 Manifestos are accounted for).

Please note, this is not a charity case.

http://rockethub.com/projects/5451-old-husher-s-urban-farm-manifesto

Thank you Beta Testers and First Taste Takers!

2012-01-30T15:39:00.009-05:00

Last week, I fairly quietly released a Rockethub campaign for my Urban Farm Manifesto, due out on February 25th. A handful of folks stepped right up to the plate, and I'd like to recognize them right now.

Chris Cowen took the first plunge, pledging $30 before the campaign "officially" started, having heard about it from the Visible Voice website.

In slight anger because Chris beat her to the punch, Sarah was next. However at that point, the campaign had "officially" started. If my readership doesn't know by now, Sarah is my wife. Numbered copies 101-200 are dubbed the "Sarah" edition after her and are numbered with a turquoise Sharpie.

Then a whole 'nother Sarah, Sarah Perkins hit the ball out of the park with a Produce Prepaid purchase. For the record, Ms. Perkins has been my best customer for two years now.

From there, it was a one-two-three punch from major players in the Cleveland cultural scene. First, it was bicycling/neighborhood sage, John McGovern, who as a result has helped start Old Husher's Heirloom Seeds. Two, LEAF's head-honcho, Rob Burgoyne, put in an order for summer plants. And three, Lakewood's Root Cafe has given me my first paying gig on the coveted lecture circuit.

The dude behind the best micro-roasted coffee in Cleveland (Aaron Pearl's Origins Beanery) followed Perkins into the land of Produce Prepaids.

Then something different happened. A stranger named Camille George bought a Manifesto copy. It appears we have mutual FB friends, but not even that extensively. Thank you Ms. George for taking a leap of faith. And if we have met, and I just don't remember, I'm sorry.

My cuz, Jamie Bowers, showed her foodie-ness with the first purchase of the very limited edition Mustard and Manifesto combo.

One of my oldest school friends, whose former bass guitar I steel shred to this day, Scot Pansing, took the Manifesto coastal. He even thanked me for posting the video on Youtube.

Representing Toledo, Brian Clarke double-bonus-ed with the Heirloom Plant Pack and the somewhat risque 70's-styled poster from the Manifesto. Brian, I'll be glad to personally work with you (if need be) on a pickup date since you'll be coming in from out of town for pickup.

Today, both, Laura Mintz and Chris Lancaster joined the Manifesto campaign.

Last, but not least is the truest of all beta testers. This person is Sonia DiFiore, who is so beta test that she couldn't even log into Rockethub and opted to send a check instead.

http://rockethub.com/projects/5451-old-husher-s-urban-farm-manifesto

Book Review #5: The Small-Mart Revolution by Michael H Shuman

2012-01-11T11:05:00.017-05:00

In this fifth installment of my book review series is a little of what I was referring to in my last blog about expanding the horizons of this blog overall. Back in the fall, I had a chance to hear author, Michael H Shuman, speak at the Sustainable Cleveland Conference. With its witty name, I had heard of his "Small-Mart Revolution" for a few years, but had no conceptual idea of its breadth and scope (or even that Shuman was the author) until his speech where he interwove "far-out" ideas like local stock exchanges with a sense of reason and we-can-do-it enthusiasm.

The Small-Mart Revolution covers a lot of territory. There's a tale of irony that helps to make the book a pleasant read. However, at its soul is a somewhat fierce "Local First" mandate that manifests itself through the book in an epic battle called TINA vs. LOIS (though Shuman specifically states that the Small-Mart Revolution is not about us vs. them mentalities).

Throughout the book there are examples of how to integrate "Local First" into every day life and how to hopefully integrate it more into our future lives. There's some numbers in there, but nothing too daunting. A major take-home are multiplier effects to be discussed later. At about 75% in, Shuman uses an economic tool called "leakages" to determine to where money "leaks" out of a community. And then makes suggestions from the data to slow/stop such "leakages." Ultimately to me, this book is about the decentralization of power through the use and not-use of money.

Battle of TINA vs. LOIS

Right from the start, Shuman sets the stage for an ongoing battle between TINA and LOIS. These ladies are in reference to business, that for me can best be described as mindsets. TINA stands for "there is no alternative." TINA is desperation; whereas, LOIS means "locally owned, import substitution," and represents vision and hope. TINA is characterized as multi-national corporations who use false promises for abatements. TINA's new jobs are often highly visible to the public and often there's alot of them (like 400 new factory workers with benefits), which means politicians love TINA with all her ribbon-cutting ceremonies and such.

This means that TINA essentially steals abatement and investment dollars from LOIS, which doubly sucks because LOIS accounts for more jobs in the USA than TINA; and TINA could really care less about your clean lake or school system in a bottom line society.

Plus imagine all of the hassle going to a EZ Clean Green Drycleaning ribbon cutting, then to a new vertically-integrated, beet sugar rum, micro-distillery opening, then to the artesanal goat cheese place, then the small theater that does nothing but black and white films, and then to the vinyl record store that actually has local bands on new Cleveland-pressed vinyl. A politician's hand would hurt after all that ribbon cutting.

Buying Local First

This is the simplest of The Small-Mart Revolution's tenets. Lucky for farmer-me that buying and eating local foods is one of the easiest money changing aspects that people can embrace. Then there are other simple things like banking with a small bank or credit union or installing solar/wind power (in this regards you're in essence buying power from yourself, and thus decentralizing power). Walking or biking also count because the transportation industry is the most non-localized industry in the USA.

Then there's some medium-difficult paradigm-shifter suggestions like local rewards cards (see Supportland card above) or business-to-business lending. And then there's some truly wild style, future-forward, yet to be embraced, but it seems awesome ideas like local currencies and stock exchanges.

Multipliers and Leakages

So when you buy locally, there's this thing that's called the multiplier effect that happens afterwards. Basically, your money circulates around your community again and again in both dollar amounts and affected parties when you buy locally (stats in book). So it's totally worth waiting at Melt that extra 20 minutes with an extra beer in hand, than go to that lecherous Panera/Jimmy John's across the street; or go to Root Cafe, instead of Caribou.

From there, Shuman uses his economic tool of leakages in order to identify how and where-to money leaves a community. This is to identify and create future localized industries in areas that would ultimately have the most impact on the community/region. This is like a one, two punch for localness. One, you create new regional economic outputs. Then, two (and this is the proverbial pinball jackpot), you get those multiplier effects double-bonusing because of the subsequent dollar inputs. Thus creating a new, more self-sufficient community/region.

Conclusion

Throughout the book, there a ton of ideas, stats, and stories. In all honesty, I've been wanting to read this book for all of my adult life (though it hasn't existed for most of that time frame). I want to buy multiple copies and start a book club, go to Slow Money Cleveland meetings, and celebrate Cleveland's Slow Money already been accomplished-ments.

Therefore, I recommend it for any body who considers themselves a forward thinker, is looking for entrepreneurial business ideas, cares about their community, is in economic development/urban planning, likes economics, or is seeking an ideology in a hectic world.

INTO THE 2012 (pronounced twenty, twelve)

2012-01-06T14:04:00.010-05:00

As I write my first blog post of 2012, I sit in shorts; I'm wearing my chacos. It's 52 degrees in Cleveland in JANUARY! And I feel giddy. I just ordered 1,000 crowns of asparagus and just received my Baker Creek Heirloom seed order (see jpeg). Furthermore, I just got done sulfuring Old Husher's Perennial Expansion Farm, which I didn't expect to get to til about March/April. So as I move into my third year of Cleveland farming, I oddly feel a little relaxed for the first time since starting this endeavor despite my fire hydrant having disappeared over two months ago.

That being said, in 2012, I will be expanding my horizons of both my business and blog. Subsequently, I am no longer an urban farmer. Rather now, I am an urban farm entrepreneur. What this symbolizes is a specific departure from thinking that the growing and selling of vegetables would be my only/main product; instead, that notion has been replaced with one that states the growing and selling of vegetables will be a major product line with future product lines to be added.

This new found business clarity can be directly attributed to the insane success of my small batch, 2011 Gray Market Edition of my Pennsylvania River Woman Mustard. This has caused me to jump on the commercial-canning-is-needed-in-Cleveland-pronto bandwagon despite my stronger and preferred belief system in food sovereignty laws. I envision a vertically integrated boutique mustard in about two years.

In terms of blog expansion, this will focus on two new areas of blog subject material, roughly described as my influences and schtuff that I think is cool locally/regionally/Ohioally as it pertains to small and regional business. I may even do profiles on other Cleveland farmers (but probably not).

In conclusion of my first blog post of 2012, I would like to give a shout out to Cool Cleveland Dot Com for using Sarah and I as models under the "Shop Local Cleveland Clothing" section of their fine website. See here: http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2011/11/shoplocal-gift-guide/.

Now if anybody has seen me lately and was wondering. Yes, I am growing out my beard as if I were writing a manifesto.

BACK IN BLACK! "A FARM IN CLEVELAND?!" T-SHIRT

2011-12-08T09:09:00.005-05:00

I am totally stoked to publicly announce the "back in black" second edition of the "A Farm In Cleveland?!" t-shirt. It took a year, but the unbleached white tees are almost sold-out. Please note, that this second edition still bears the infamous "?" because a farm in Cleveland is still a preposterous idea.

So why black? Initially, my hunch was that the general sentiment of locavores/policy people/farmers would favor an unbleached white tee for the a la naturalness of it...and there was some of that. But there was a lot more of "do you have it in black?" I caught on pretty quickly and vowed never again to deny my heavy metal roots by printing a white shirt.

Plus, this is Cleveland. We ain't very flashy. Subliminally or consciously, we all know the beer belly slimming attributes of a black tee. And the practicality of going with anything while being able to hide stains can't be beat!

Apart from the back in blackness of them, the shirts are still the same ol' 8-color print. There are men's and women's styles. The women's are printed on Bella brand, fitted, made in the USA, organic cotton. Whilst, the men's are on Heavy Gildan cotton tees (like many of my metal tees). They were screened at Clevo's Jakprints, whose professionalism and turnaround time are awesome.

Through the holiday season, Lakewood's brother-to-the-farmer, Root Cafe will have a ready stock of shirts ($20) for you and all of your loved ones. I will also be selling these wares at the Gordon Square Holiday Market on December 17th from 10AM - 2PM in the Gordon Square Arcade. Being that I'm an all-access farmer, if those options don't work, contact me at jhusher@hotmail.com to arrange something. Heck, I could probably even deliver for anybody thinking of multiple shirts.

And if you're out of the state, or out of the country, believe me, the irony/hope of "A Farm In Cleveland?!" t-shirt will not be lost in translation. And for that reason, I also have Paypal available.

My First Path in Two Years!

2011-11-21T12:48:00.005-05:00

Some people get all OCD when planning to farm/garden/grow. Often, pathways are the first set of infrastructure built on a farm. Quickly followed with very even precision-measured rows. I'm still working on my rows, but alas, after last week I'm proud to say that I have my first pathway!

The path sits right behind the fence-line, facing W 130th (the main street). Construction materials were cardboard and woodchips, plundered from Factory Direct's dumpster and Mount Woodchip respectively.

The path's primary purpose is weed suppression with three sub-goals for that weed suppression.

One: to make it easier to use the fence as a trellis.

Two: to give me more access to my drip irrigation header line.

And Three (I don't like admitting this one): to "neaten up" the frontage in hopes of somewhat pacifying the thorn-in-my-side, Pete GagePro.

I'm certain I'll reach two of those three sub-goals, but there's no telling with Pete. Let's cross our fingers.

As always, Subee-1 performed marvelously.

The Last 2 Weeks (and that's all I got to show for it)

2011-11-04T15:32:00.007-04:00

One of the major frustrations with farming is the extreme delayed gratification. Them photos above represent the last two weeks of my life. When I compare my thigh/wrist/hand soreness to those photos of pink flags and flat ground, I just think to myself, "really?"

Of course, that bottom photo of garlic barely shows off the jackpot asphalt that I was again lucky enough to hit in one year's time (let's just hope I don't get nearly arrested again when making drops in friendly neighborhood apartment dumspters). The land in the top photo is two thousand square feet of sunchokes at my new Perennial Expansion Farm.

That land had never been worked, and I hit a similar jackpot of rocks and sub-boulders. This time there was no guilt associated with worm carnage as I found only one in the entire two thousand feet. The pockmarks left from the removal of sub-boulders will be filled with Old Husher's brand of worm inoculant/castings, complete with worms and delicious organic goodies.

So speaking back to delayed gratification, it should be noted for educational sake that I won't even see a garlic scape until June or a sunchoke tuber 'til the fall of 2012, which is time enough to erase these feelings of exhaustion. It's no wonder hardly anyone is planting new orchards around here (coupled with a lack of land tenure).

Now taking a gander at that sunchoke plot, you should notice a heaping pile of Mount Trashmore that dwarfs my Subaru. It's an illegal dump that is the property of Ashland Chemical. Apparently, Cleveland has cited Ashland, but the Mountain remains. Weird pickups dumping, and even the occasional semi unloading. Meanwhile, people hop the fence and sort for scrap. Given these conditions, don't think I use the term post-ghetto wasteland lightly. I specifically chose my new plot with a view for juxtaposition.

Thanks goes out to Ed Sotelo, who spent three hours of his life de-cloving 20 pounds of garlic, Mike Birchler and Kevin Orr, who each also spent three hours of their lives soil-prepping the sunchoke site, and Bruce Cormack, who filled the void of sunchoke tuber seed stock with 15 gallons of tubers (three 5-gallon buckets worth of sunchokes, if you were wondering what "15 gallons of tubers" meant).

Summer 2011 in Tweets

2011-10-27T11:10:00.010-04:00

If I urban farm tweeted, instead of blogged, it would have gone like this with some introspective tweets thrown in for good measure.

Inserted hyperlinks nixay the 140 character count rule.

GENERAL AND GOODNESS

Looks like I fell into the ol’ farm blog summer cliché.

All in all, the summer was rad, slightly marred by rain and more marred by mice, but I’ll take it.

Sales tripled! But still nowhere near enough to live on. Onwards, upwards, and fine tuning is needed.

Most of that tripling was people based sales.

That being said, these restaurants treated me well: Fat Cat’s, Root Cafe, Sow Food and to a lesser extent Bar Cento. Mucho Gracias.

Mexican Sour Gherkins ruled the season. Next year, I’m sure there’ll be imitator growers :) and I won’t be able to say exclusive anymore.

As a farmer, don’t visit your mom on Mother’s Day. Sorry mom.

I found out that I’m legally zoned to have a farmstand without having to go to Cleveland’s Kafka-esque Board of Zoning Appeals. Sweetness!

Old Husher’s Farm now accepts WIC and Senior Food Coupons. So far none of these folks have been crackhead junkies like the teabaggers say.

If anybody knows the secret to selling heirloom peppers, please enlighten me.

This week, I pulled off my 1st farm-to-school fall veggie sampler at Berea Elementary. The kids ate kale chips and kohlrabi! Success!

I threatened the children with an “F,” if they didn’t try my veggies. Just kidding. Also, there was no Hidden Valley Ranch on hand.

Actually, it was on hand, we just didn’t need to crack the bottle.

LESSONS LEARNED

A good varmint is a dead varmint.

Skunks, groundhogs, possums, mice. I don’t discriminate.

In the epic 2011 Battle of Mice Versus Melons, the mice won (see representative photo).

There’s no such thing as a vegan vegetable. Something’s gotta die.

FUTURE

I found another quarter acre plot for Old Husher’s Perennial Expansion Farm (OHPEF).

OHPEF is located in the post-ghetto wasteland mentioned in my blog, http://thegardenlifeandtimesofjustinhusher.blogspot.com/2011/03/csa-share-revenue-bond-partnership-and.html. Funny how that works.

Next year, I either need to work on better spacing, or conversely better thinning.

I could use a trailer at this point in my life too.

Some restaurants are full of total ish.

Momocho allegedly told me that they “wouldn’t know what to do with 10 pounds of ROYGBIV cherry tomatoes.”

Three Birds allegedly told me they “have a garden out back where we grow all that (regarding basil).” Upon inspection no garden was found.

Deagan’s allegedly wants a three month production schedule in advance.

My second year in, and already I’m competing with the big boys, Chef’s Garden.

I actually like competition so that last statement shouldn’t be in the BS section, but I didn’t know where else to put it.

DRAMA AND RANT

Pete Gagepro is still harassing me. The City of Cleveland still won’t commit to anything long-term and took four months to return my lease.

I’m more worried about Cleveland’s slackadaisicalness, than Pete’s neurosis.

The City says they want orchards, but won’t give us long-term leases or sell us our land affordably. That’s a mixed message.

What the City needs to realize is that they are training us to move (for cheaper land in the ‘burbs/rural lands) with piddly 5-year leases.

Conversely, there are some hardcore poser/slackers in our Local Food Scene. Self-absorbed and selfish, these folks make us all look bad.

That’s why urban homestead laws, like the one I wrote about in this blog, http://thegardenlifeandtimesofjustinhusher.blogspot.com/2011/02/cleveland-urban-homestead-law.html are crucial.

The Importance of Urban Farmers Selling at Urban Farmers' Markets

2011-06-21T16:24:00.016-04:00

Now that the farm market season is hopefully upon all of us, I'm going to discuss a topic near and dear to my heart and that is the importance of urban farmers actually selling at urban farmers' markets. I know this sounds like a no-brainer. However, there is a major urban farmer contingent, who thinks and acts otherwise. My friend, Gabe, likened it to one of those rock bands that puts out album after album and never tours.

In this blog, I will discuss how urban farmers' markets affect economic development, local food access, and the basic reasoning as to why some urban farmers ignore urban farm markets. But not in that order. Also to my discredit, this is all my opinion and none of it has been quantified (Sorry, I've been watching way too many X-Files lately, and perhaps is also the reason that I think the City of Cleveland is gunning for my farm).

In the insider world of urban farming, there's a lot of discussion as to how a farmer makes the most sales (and subsequent money) with the least amount of work. It's the classic efficiency scenario that corporations and MBA programs use to rationalize all sorts of stuff. Most of these discussions eventually lean towards restaurant sales being a far superior means of earning money than selling at farmers' markets in the inner city.

And in my experience, this is completely true. Selling a whole cooler of 20 heads of lettuce at $2.50 a head is a pretty awesome feeling. It normally only takes about ten minutes of transaction time, plus gas and driving expense, and it often leads to other sales. In modern capitalism, this approach is heralded.

Let me clarify. I sell to restaurants for the money. I sell at urban farmers' markets for the people. Arguably, the two main tenets for urban farming are economic development and healthy food access. I believe that the practice of urban farmers only selling to restaurants is detrimental for long term economic development and healthy food access for all people. For all people being the key phrase here.

The next statement may shock and offend some people. I think it has been alluded to many times over, but never formally stated. Food should not be about class. However and unfortunately, food is about class.

Let me clarify. I love my restaurant sales. They seriously add-up. But when I make those restaurant sales, I know it's doubtful that any child, let alone an economically disadvantaged one, or even an economically disadvantaged adult will ever eat any of my produce at that restaurant. This is by no means the fault of the restaurants. I feel like they are the very necessary glamorous public relations part of the whole local food scene.

This is why I also sell at an urban farmers' market. You literally have no idea who your clientele will be. I've had city attorneys, lots of single moms, every once in a while, children (especially when I have Mexican Sour Gherkins). The age and racial diversity at Gordon Square Farmer's Market is almost as diverse as Gordon Square itself. The opportunity for the public (especially the economically disadvantaged) to randomly see other members of the public making mostly cash money out of local resources can be inspiring to others in the economic sense.

Seeing is still believing, and that's why being seen at a farmers' market is important. Otherwise, these folks riding the bus are just seeing a farmer work/sweat their crop to no readily seen cash benefit. Which in the words of my mom, "looks like alotta work."

In addition, if as an urban farmer, you want to be supportive of the whole social justice/healthy food access issues, then it is also necessary to sell at urban farmers' markets and food desserts. For most micro-scale farmers, this is the only way to access many of the government/agency food assistance programs. The corollary to that is these urban farmers' markets are the only ways some individuals (with or without assistance) access anything close to fresh produce. Blowing people's minds with a literal rainbow's array of grape tomatoes with the exception of the color blue is an equally great feeling as the $50 restaurant sale.

Farmers' markets have been part of close-knit, interwoven communities since we've stopped hunting and gathering. Middle-eastern medinas and Europe's very artisanal craft food stores are lingering examples of this in modern day. It is something that seems rooted into us. The general camaraderie and technique-sharing, and capitalistic benchmarking are all side effects of farmers' market participation (the same can also be said about sunburns).

Lastly, I've also heard that the want for anonymity is another seemingly valid reason to not sell at urban farmers' markets. To me, this is a completely valid argument as long as it is not inversely negated with incessant Facebook updates.

That's basically it. The picture up top is of my dad and I last father's day weekend at Gordon Square. This week (tomorrow) I will have have soil blocked-beets (they're long and thin), the last garlic scapes, green onions, the last of the speckled like a trout lettuce, Red Russian and Lacinato kale, and my first chard. Food to the people!

What's a Garlic Scape?

2011-06-10T14:55:00.011-04:00

In my quest to educate the public in order to increase my sales, I feel that I need to bring the garlic scape into the populist's light of day. Thereby in this blog, I will attempt to answer the question, what is a garlic scape?

Simply put, a garlic scape is a young and ideally still tender flowering stalk of the garlic plant. For years now, garlic scapes have enjoyed popularity amongst the elusive foodie crowd. But now more and more, regular folks and off-the-grid types are getting into this under-utilized, near equal form of garlic.

To me, a scape looks incredibly similar to a curled green snake. As such, that first photo is called, "Darth Vader Under the Influence of Medusa," which is really just a silly way to highlight a $2 bundle of Old Husher's Garlic Scapes. The second photo up there is of the garlic scape in its natural environment. As folklore goes, it is said that you harvest a garlic scape after the weight of the flowering structure (the snake head thingy) weighs enough to curl the scape downward. Subsequently, the garlic scapes in the photo are ready to be harvested and sub-subsequently have been harvested since said photo has been taken.

Blah, blah, blah, enough of the history lesson already, what's a garlic scape taste like? Unsurprisingly, garlic scapes taste a lot like regular garlic, just a little bit mellower. That being said, if you were to make raw garlic scape and almond pesto (recipe to follow), you'd still be able to ward off vampires and future lovers for about six hours.

In terms of usage, the garlic scape is extremely versatile, just like its regular bulbed form. Often a puree is made and simply tossed in pasta. Or scapes can be chopped up and used in stir-frys or omelets. Garlic scape and almond pesto is downright amazing and can be used on sandwiches, as a chip-dip, as a pasta sauce and so forth. If you're getting a hankering of an inclination to get out the food processor and hear it go "v-r-r-r, v-r-r-r (with rolled r's like you took German in high school), then here's the recipe.

Garlic Scape and Almond

10 garlic scapes
1/3 to 1/2C parmeson
1/3C slivered almonds (toasted if you want to get crazy)
olive oil to your preferred consistency (a 1/2C is a good start)
Salt to taste from the sea or otherwise (this is for the people!)

Food processorize, or Blenderize, or Mortar and Pestle-ize (in which case chop everything up fairly fine first) all the above ingredients. Adding the olive oil slowly to desired consistency. Enjoy.

Thank you for reading Garlic Scape 101: What's a Garlic Scape?

Urban Farming Colloquialisms

2011-05-10T17:11:00.004-04:00

A few months ago over the course of one week, I heard three separate urban farmisms for the first time that all meant the same thing in context. These three colloquialisms were "redneck tech," "ghetto tech," and my personal favorite that epitomizes the Cleveland Urban Farm scene, "hoodbilly." Hoodbilly was courtesy of Gordon Square Farm Market Manager, Josh Klein.

Conceptually, all these terms mean doing something on the cheap and often with recycled/salvaged/repurposed materials. The aesthetics are somewhat anti-suburban. You get bragging rights for how much something didn't cost and bonus points for duct tape and pallets. Most often, function triumphs over fashion. This ain'ta Martha Stewart chicken coop. This is hoodbillyism.

The pictures up top are perfectly hoodbilly. The first pic is a clandestine chicken coop. You know it's clandestine because of the pirate flag. In Cleveland, would-be neighbor narcs can easily be bribed to look the other way for a few eggs. Surprisingly, the pallet construction blends well in the background with the other fence.

The second and third pics are what I think Lakewood doesn't have in mind with it's "Keep Lakewood Beautiful" campaign. Nonetheless, we got five gallon buckets from the Beer Engine, broken shovel-handle tent posts, duct tape, salvaged planks from some court between 84th and 85th, and twine! Even the greenhouse plastic came second hand from a commercial operation out in Oberlin.

Finally, the last picture is of a retaining wall at the base of my storage container. Again, the planks were salvaged, the woodchips were free, the yard bags re-used, and subsequent leaf humus and dirt were hand dug. However, some of my hoodbilly brethren may call me a sellout because the stakes were store bought. To that I say, all good hoodbillys know how to choose their battles and stakes were just not in the free-cycled cards that week.

Stay hoodbilly, yall!

Some Good Lookin' Dudes Rockin' Old Husher's Gear

2011-04-29T18:35:00.010-04:00

Through the years from time to time, I get a jpeg sent to my personal email with a picture of somebody, somewhere rockin' the "A Farm in Cleveland?!" t-shirt. Here's some of those jpegs.

First up is Kevin Glutton, sporting the tee on a warm Maui beach. Kevin has been bonelessing around Cleveland for as long as anyone can remember, plays bass and sings in the appropriately named Gluttons, and is a fairly regular farmhand at Old Husher's Farm. Sorry Ladies, this one's taken.

Last, but not least, is Earache Wallace. He's a very well assimilated Portlander via Ohio. His skills include rock n roll poster art and being one of the best psychedelic/metal crossover guitarists this or that side of the Mississippi. If Kylesa ever needed a third guitarist to do a modern version of "Freebird," then Earache would be my first suggestion. Until then, Earache is earning his teaching degree in art and is looking forward to teaching hessians the fine craft of silk screening.

Cold Chillin with Chef Cooley @ AMP 150

2011-04-21T19:02:00.007-04:00

One of my favorite things in modern life is a gathering/special event, where no one takes any photos, not by a "cameras verboten" kind of thing, but because people are in the moment and that outsider lens even on a phone is just outside enough. I first recognized this as-a-happening several months back at the Ohio City Seed Swap in the Open Yoga Gallery. Even though there was an insane spread of heirlooms and weirdo cultivars and probably at least over a million seeds laid-out over three foldout tables, nobody took a photo.

On 4/20 of 2011, the Cleveland Farmer's Summit commenced at AMP 150 to cold chill with Executive Chef Ellis Cooley. I am fairly certain it was one of those no photos nights. Annabel Khouri of Bay Branch Farm organized the evening and kudos to her. Also in attendance were Turning Point, Erie's Edge, Basil and Beyond, a newcomer named Laura, George Remington Steele, and Sonia DiFiore, who just bought land in Oberlin for her blueberry farm, whose name is unbeknownst to me!

Now, AMP 150 is in a Marriott, basically next to the Cleveland Airport. So despite AMP 150's near-guru status amongst locavores, given these precepts, I had my reservations. Rest assured, by the end of the evening, not only was I blown away by my micro-bok choys in oyster sauce and pork/sweet potato sammich, I also felt that I just hung out with one of the most straight-forward, local foodie chefs in Cleveland. Chef Cooley got a sort-of Miami surfer-dude glow to him that matches his hometown and his stylized blond mohawk. When I called him dude, I don't think he objected too much.

The Cleveland Farmer's Summit had a special room set aside in AMP 150, where we ate and fired off question after question to Chef Cooley. I learned all sorts of things that night. Definite mentionables include AMP 150's quarter acre garden in the would-be-just-mowed grassland at the end of the parking lot and the Marriott's rooftop apiary (that's awesomely insane!).

Though we all flirted with hints of dollar pricing, specifics were kept gray. Instead, we learned of standards in terms of quality with re-assurances towards premium dollar pricing. After quality (which by the way Old Husher's Farm excels in), storage seemed to be the next major concern. I was hoping for the magic bullet when I asked Chef Cooley about basil storage, but all of our heads scratched in unison regarding the basil storage conundrum.

So after quality and then storage, one of the overriding, underlining themes to our dinner chat was "alot of early communication" with an emphasis on "alot." My interpretation of this sentiment correlates perfectly with my "Local Vegetable of the Couple of Days" concept from prior blog. Boiled down, it means that Chef Cooley is willing to work with us, small Cleveland farmers, given that we let him know what we have, when we can have it, and then ultimately deliver it at that time with prior notice. The "at that time" clause is the variable I'm most worried about. Being that I don't own weather (this 2011 Cleveland temperate rain forest spring is a perfect example), I work in ballpark time frames, and not space shuttle countdowns.

For an urban farmer like myself, I think a perfect example of sales synergy would be Old Husher's Walla Walla Onion Rings. Once harvested, the onions will have a curing period, and then have a one month shelf life, which in the case of the Walla Walla is the trade-off for being awesomely sweet. For me with a couple hundred pounds of Wallas, I will need to move those quickly. During the curing, I can give a restaurant a heads-up to approximate weight and delivery time. The restaurant then has time to adjust their menu accordingly and hopefully hype Old Husher's Walla Walla Onion Rings. Given everything Chef Cooley said that evening, this scenario seems win-win.

To conclude just for the record, I want to mention that Old Husher's Farm is the closest urban farm to AMP 150, a mere 20 blocks away. Thanks again to Chef Cooley for cold chillin with us, Cleveland Farmers, and to Annabel Khouri for organizing the event. McDermott, your presence was missed.

Brussel Sprouts Battle Royale

2011-04-12T10:33:00.022-04:00

From the end of February and throughout March, I pushed myself to the limits of brussel sprouts addiction, seeking them out wherever I could in the seediest of places so that I may present the straight dope on this terrifying member of the cabbage family. Warning: this blog may be a little too real for some of you.

I, too, used to be afraid of brussel sprouts, having cried at the tender age of 12 when my parents forced me to eat them at the kitchen table. Just like the rest of the 80's that included Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" campaign/Minor Threat's "straight-edge" and Tipper Gore's "Parent's Resource Music Center," I was scarred further into complacency. While I discovered the pleasures of micro-brews in the early 90's with the likes of Jason Brady and Jeremy Sanford over Edmund Fitzgeralds, and I always had a love affair with fairly insane-o music, this wound carried another two decades into my life.

I'm not really sure how I fell so hard so fast. All I can tell you is where I'm at now, and it ain't pretty. There's the at-home weekly roasting or pan-searing/pan-frying. I'm on the Web, looking at menus to feed my fix. Web page, per Web page, I keep asking, "do they have sprouts, do they have sprouts?" I peruse the starters, the apps, the sides. "Might they be hidden amongst an entree," I wonder while salivating? I've even gone so far as to use social media sites like Facebook to find my next hookup. My farm planning hasn't escaped this scourge either, and I'm ashamed to admit that in 2011 I will be growing brussel sprouts on Old Husher's Farm. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that brussel sprouts have now impacted all aspects of my life.

It is with this mindset, I present you, "Brussel Sprouts Battle Royale," a no-holds barred match between Cleveland's brussel sprouts dealers. I may lose some present/future customers because of this blog. I may also throw out some zingers that I later regret because of said loss, but I go forward with a clear and unbiased conscious. Disclosures will be appropriate.

After a month in the field, patterns emerged. The police will be glad to know that the epidemic is currently contained within Cleveland's Westside. After many attempts to find the most elusive of brussel sprouts on the Eastside, I have determined, that like the rest of us in Cleveland, the brussel sprouts have not made it over the formidable border known as the Cuyahoga River. The going rate on a plate of sprouts seems standardized, consistently ranging from $4-$6. Furthermore, the preparations often took on a similar theme: pork and/or fried in lard, a tanginess, and a crunch.

1st Place: Bar Cento on W 25th

Disclosure: I have sold mizuna and baby bok choys to chef, Mike Nowak of Bar Cento, recipient of 1st place standings in the first ever Brussel Sprouts Battle Royale.

Now, what makes Bar Cento's sprouts so good? To start, the sprouts are deep-fried in a combo of lard/duck fat to the point of slight searing crispness on the outer edge leaves. This single detail is what separated Bar Cento from the rest. The sprouts were then tossed with candied bacon/pancetta and a mustard/cider vinegar reduction. Salty, roasty, firm and crisp, these brussel sprouts rule. Priced at $5, the portion size was average. On the evening of this tasting, the brussel sprouts were paired with Bar Cento's french fries, which I, for the record, think are the best in town.

2nd Place: Tie between Tremont's Fat Cats and Lorain Avenue General Store

Disclaimer: Though I have given samples to Fat Cats kitchen, I have never sold to any Ricardo Sandoval establishment or even heard back from them.

Coming in at a whopping $6, Fat Cats topped the scale within the limited pricing category. Parma prosciutto filled the pork and salt void, which was complimented with chicken broth and sherry. The whole plate came together with some gorgonzola that just perfectly, funk-ily rounded out all the edges. From what I can tell from 4-7 pm, Monday through Friday, Fat Cats has the best food values in town with their food and beverage happy hour.

Disclaimer: The Lorain Avenue General Store folks are my friends, and these brussel sprouts were formally served at their house and not in a restaurant.

This is a time where my memory is a little foggy, where you might be able to say the brussel sprouts are really having a impact on my short-term memory. I remember the sprouts were served family-style to a table of ten diners. I remember that I didn't want to embarrass myself and wanted to look like a moderate brussel sprout eater. But when that Pete guy helped himself to the last sprout, I could hardly control my rage. Thankfully, there was a molten lava cake on hand to subdue my anger. Again, the details are foggy. Pan-seared in bacon fat and then roasted in the oven with garlic, and then all mixed with Aaron's wild-style dressing that was like Sri Racha, soy, honey, maple syrup, and a slew of other things...I think. This was the most complicated preparation of the Battle Royale.

3rd Place: Melt Bar and Grilled in beautiful downtown Lakewood

Disclosure: Matt Fish and I have exchanged exactly one back and forth email about me potentially selling sprouts to Melt this fall.

Even though Melt's brussel sprouts came in third place overall standings, there's enough uniquenesses here that they could be arguably the best sprouts in Cleveland, especially to the Cleveland Jewish/Muslim/vegan/vegetarian communities. That is to say, Melt's sprouts were the only sprouts out of seven preparations that did not contain the swine. Considering all the "game" most of the other restaurants have in the Battle Royale, I find this pork-based standardization bewildering.

Now look at that jumbo plate of brussel sprouts! Just like most things Melt, the portion size was huge. It could feed an army of vegans. Three of us got kind of full before our sandwiches even got there, and then we still had leftover sprouts, as well as, the extra half a sandwich. The glaze was peach chipolte and every once in a while had a slow subtle burn. Amazingly priced at $5.50.

Editor's note: I technically don't know if these brussel sprouts were vegan. They seemed like it. Empower yourself, and ask next time you go to Melt.

4th place: Lolita's in Tremont

Disclaimer: None needed.

Coming into the Battle Royale, Lolita's was a strong favorite to win, being owned by Michael Symon and also being the birthplace of this extreme love affair about a year and a half ago. I considered it a homecoming. My hands got sweaty just entering the restaurant.

While the sprouts were still really good, they weren't great. Lolita's also fries in lard, and I think they simply forget to drain the sprouts. Between the little layers of leafy cabbage folds, it felt like corpuscles of lard popped out at every bite...and not in a good way. Once, I got over this unpleasantry and laid-back a little bit, I still enjoyed the sprouts (tossed in white anchovy, capers, and walnuts) enough to finish the bowl. $5.

That however can not be said for Michael Symon's world famous burger that night. I ordered medium rare. The aforementioned, Aaron, ordered his rare. Neither of our burgers came out with any redness. For that matter, neither of our burgers came out with any pinkness. Like, for real, what's up with that?

5th Place: Stone Mad Pub in Gordon Square

Disclaimer: None needed exactly (please see below).

But to be fair to Stone Mad Pub, I am not so sure if they are deserving of such low rankings in the Battle Royale. Basically, I went to Stone Mad after I had already eaten dinner for a Gordon Square Farmer's Market Meeting. Though I had expected to have a beer, I didn't expect to randomly find brussel sprouts on the menu. Even though I was full, I couldn't deny what may have been the from-out-of-nowhere x-factor. The sprouts were completely palatable with bacon, sauteed onions, and strong cider vinegar. I just had a hard time enjoying them because of fullness. When the weather warms up, I can't wait to hang out on the beautiful Stone Mad patio and try the sprouts again. If it's any consolation, my friend's teenager who doesn't like sprouts, liked these sprouts. That's actually a pretty big consolation. Low price of $4.

6th Place: Deagan's, also in beautiful downtown Lakewood

Disclaimer: Deagan's is the new "Gastro Pub" in town that I'd like to sell to in the future due to proximity to my home/distribution center. However, I am giving them last place, and I'm gonna gripe a little bit cause I keep it real.

I've had these brussel sprouts twice now, and both times they have failed to impress. As a matter of personal preference, I'm just not a fan of jumbo sprouts like the ones pictured below. The pairing with salted pork belly sounds good on paper, but the salt just doesn't impart the same uniform flavor in the way bacon does. Furthermore, the ample chunks of pork belly with their chewy, fatty, gristly-ness could be off-putting to some. As for the service, it's full of teenage-girls, who describe $6 pints as, "light," or "dark," which is very, very annoying. In Deagan's defense, the rest of our dinner was good. Also, $5. Thanks to Aaron Pearl, who accompanied me and professionally photographed (meaning he had a smart phone with flash, whereas, I just had a phone) three of the seven outings. I believe he used the three outings as surveillance so that he could help achieve a 2nd Place standing for Lorain Avenue General Store. The world of brussel sprouts is seedy, indeed.

Last Week's Pictorial

2011-04-05T09:34:00.004-04:00

I'm dedicating this blog to my buddy, Gabe, who I didn't help move at all last week. Instead, I tilled, planted, sorted, potted-up tomatoes, unrolled some nasty second-hand greenhouse plastic, and performed other necessary/tedious chores. Thanks goes out to Chad Krawtschenko, Josh Klein, and Lynn Rodemann, who all assisted with various tasks.

This photo is just kind of cool and does not represent any amount of sweat equity. I call it "Lettuce and Onions under a GlowCube." Here's the germination station again. This time it's a little more full. We have some soil blocked beets in the top foreground and hardy kiwis on the bottom edges. A totally charming photograph of myself and the nasty aforementioned plastic. That single piece was over 100 feet long and 24 feet wide with gallons of water stuck in the seams. Josh, Lynn, and I unrolled it and took box knives to it in order to cut it into manageable pieces. Photo by Lynn. That's alotta onions! This photo represents the first purchase by the Cleveland Farmers Buyer's Club. Twelve of us went in on 3,600 onions, which allowed us to drop the price of a single bundle from $12 all way down to $2.50. Please note, about 1,500 of these onions are mine. A picture of my tilling handiwork. Directly left of the photo will be the 650 square foot asparagus bed, going in some time within the next week. All of them potted-up tomatoes. Yes, my house is a mess.

CSA Share Revenue Bond Partnership and Growing Power

2011-03-22T09:55:00.005-04:00

I started the pre-7 AM seasonal farmer wake-up last supermoon Saturday, March 19th. Groggilly, I trudged over to 81st and Kinsman to be a part of RID-ALL’s ”Green ’N Tha Ghetto,” which if I may add RID-ALL is a horrible name for a greening project. It sounds like RID-ALL is going to exterminate us. As for the ghetto, the site location seemed to be more like a wasteland, which is the next step in an area’s decline after most folks leave the ghetto.

When I type wasteland, I don’t type it lightly. In a total area of at least five acres, there were about four houses. The rest were demolished. Trash was strewn everywhere, abandoned cars, Wild Irish Rose bottles, fast food wrappers, the norm. There were at least two separate packs of wild dogs. My buddy, Chad, almost fell into a six-foot sinkhole while walking on the ”sidewalk,” and there was a fire-burning, tarp-built homeless shelter in the woods. If there were ever an area that needed stabilized, then this is it. I hope, additionally, RID-ALL takes the time to get rid of all the litter in the area.

The workshop was broken up into two separate workgroups: worm culture/composting and fish culture. Will Allen led the composting group, while some younger guy, named Ryan, put together the fish and plant-growing bunkbed. I focused my energies on the fish culture, and as such had very little dealings with Mr. Allen that day. My few interludes with the compost group left me the impression of WIll Allen as some sort of Urban Farming Drill Sargent, complete with ”I can’t hear you!” calls, followed by the group’s shouting response.

Now I gotta admit that even though this was a workshop, I was relatively a bum that day. However in my defense, there were people in the crowd who had never operated a cordless drill/saw before or used a socket wrench. Furthermore, I will be digging plenty of holes in the forthcoming months. Lastly, I listened hard, and I feel like I got the blueprint burned into my brain. Winning!

Basically, that blue print is very much like a 4 X 8 bunkbed with six 4 X 4 posts on the outside of the structure. The fish pond was the bottom bunk, made with three stacked 2 X 12s to a height of three feet and lined with 0.45 mil pond liner. The top bunk would have been a little more scary to sleep with a single 2 X 4 as the lone wall. The top was minimally angled so that water could use gravity to drop back down into the fish pond through a standard shower drain. The top was also pond liner lined and eventually filled with pea gravel or lava rock.

So the whole system works with a sump pump in the fish pond which sucks up water/fish poop/nitrites and nitrates and pumps it to the pea graveled top bunk. The pea gravel is the biofilter that breaks the nitrites and nitrates down into plant-usable nitrogen for the plants that are also growing on the top bunk. Subsequently, the bio-filtration also cleans the water for the fish’s sake, and the gravity fall to the fish pond aerates the water. The Growing Power folks claimed the bacterial population in the pea gravel was naturally occurring, but I think it has much more to do with filling the pond with five-gallon buckets of water that formerly housed worm casings. All in all, it seemed fairly simple, especially after doing a hydroponics internship at Gardens Under Glass this winter.

At the time of the workshop’s conclusion, I felt all my questions had been answered. However a couple days later now, I have a major question about fish and disease, and whether or not Growing Power have dealt with disease in any of their tilapia or perch growing. If anybody has any input on this, that would be greatly appreciated.

After this Growing Power workshop, I feel ready, able, and wanting to farm some fish. However, it seems that a greenhouse is a necessary first step. So I’m just throwing this out there. If anybody is interested in sponsoring or partnering with Old Husher in greenhouse construction, then please be in contact.

Several examples of sponsorships immediately come to mind. I wouldn’t mind partnering with a non-profit, like a Development Corporation, who in return could get CSA Shares for the hungry in their area. This is what I call the CSA Share Revenue Bond. It could also work with an individual philanthropic donor.

Another partnership could be with a corporation, most-likely food-based like a restaurant or caterer. In this partnership, the corporation would buy the greenhouse in exchange for ultra-local access of a percentage of produce/fish at market prices. In return, the corporation gets a say (within reason) as to what’s grown in the greenhouse, as well as ultra-local bragging rights.

Well, there I go on my soapbox again. But those are just two examples off the top of my head with what feels like unlimited permutations. So seriously, I believe some amazing things can get done through some of these small-scale partnerships. If anybody wants to get in touch in order to do so, then please do.

The Germination Station

2011-03-15T14:31:00.008-04:00

Question: Can you say "germination station" with a HAL 2001 spaceship accent?

Answer: Ha! No, you can't! We copyrighted it!

SIKE!

On the bottom shelf, we have 400 mixed solanaceae on top of a heat pad and under a LED. Even with the heat pad, I think the basement's cool temps is slowing them down.

On the top shelf, we have four distinct light zones. From fore to background, we have compact fluorescent (not lit), a T-5, a LED, and concluding with another compact fluorescent.

I know it sounds like a complicated mess, but I'm trying to figure out what's the best/most easiest/convenient/cost effective lights to use over the long run. Main factors include ease of hanging, ease of moving/rehanging, quality of light, upfront costs, costs over time (energy), and duration. I will report over time. For now, I got 2000 sprouts to be watering.

Be on the lookout for Brussel Sprouts Battle Royale coming soon to the blogosphere near you.

Some Press

2011-02-26T09:50:00.005-05:00

As evidenced by the above real postcard received from James in Denver, my sphere seems to be growing beyond family, friends, and Facebook. On February 17th, I gave a presentation at Cleveland State University about my farm, land re-usage, and current issues facing Cleveland farmers. Journalist, Lee Chilcote, was in attendance. Here is his report.

http://www.freshwatercleveland.com/devnews/oldhushersfarm022411.aspx

And James in Denver, I will be in touch in a few days.

A Cleveland Urban Homestead Law

2011-02-20T18:30:00.016-05:00

On Thursday the 17th at my Cleveland State presentation, one of the topics I was asked to touch upon is what else can the City of Cleveland do to further the local foods movement. Though there are several places for improvement, today I will focus on one subject in particular that I brought up to the crowd. This subject is long-term Cleveland Land Bank access and the potential to create Cleveland Urban Homesteading Laws.

In January, me and 50 or so other Re-Imagining Cleveland grantees signed a four-year lease with City of Cleveland for our subsequent Land Bank properties. This four-year document feels pretty good and secure at first. Then I start thinking about my current paw paws and the future chestnuts that I want to plant. It will be at least four years until I see any real fruits from these plantings. However, beyond the four year lease, Cleveland is being eerily, attorneyalistically quiet about its plan for the properties.

If you look at those photos above, it's pretty easy to see that my farm is located on a major Cleveland street near two major highways. Thousands of cars drive past every day. To shorten the verbiage and get to the point, my farm would make a kick-ass spot for a BP gas station. Then when you consider that these funds for Re-Imagining Cleveland came from the Federal government and technically not directly from Cleveland itself, it's also pretty easy to understand that these green spaces might just be only a holding pattern for the City. In four years, it's clear that Cleveland believes there might just be some corporate investing again. Maybe?

It is this complete lack of being "all-in" that terrifies many of us new and would-be Cleveland urban farmers. Admittedly, some of the folks in the urban foods and sustainability movement are total flakes, either having only heard these terms through Oprah and Martha, or just being a little too liberally extreme with what is acceptable for city land usage.

At this point, it feels as if we've reached an impasse. Cleveland farmers want what every farmer in the world wants: land security. Whereas, the City wants to protect itself from flakes/liability, while keeping its door open to a better economic opportunity. In all actuality, who could really blame Cleveland?

Being the solution-maker that I've been becoming, I have a solution. That solution is Cleveland Urban Homesteading Laws. These laws, or ordinances, or whatever they'd technically be in terms of legal jargon would be modeled after the Federal Homesteading Laws of yesteryear. I've often likened the land availability in Cleveland and the rest of the Rust Belt to what the early American settlers must have felt. It's just that this time there's no American Indian Genocide or African Slavery to taint (understatement) the historical record.

For those unaware, back in the day, up until about the 80's, the American government would give away large tracts of land to adventurous/rugged individuals to "homestead" the land. Basically what this meant is that the individual/family had a prescribed amount of time (often five to seven years) to prove to the American government that they could make a living off of the land (think trapping, fishing, mining, logging, farming, and very earlier tourism). If at the end of the allotted time frame, the individual/family could prove that they had earned a living from the land, then the family would be granted that tract.

I propose something in lines with this methodology as a way to create a formalized mechanism to grant land rights to Cleveland farmers. I would further suggest to even lower the bar from "earning a living" to "making quantifiable supplemental income." Being that all land bank lots are not created equally in terms of size, it may be necessary to put dollar amount standards on various lot sizes. For example, a Cleveland urban homesteader, working an eighth of an acre may need to show $3K of revenue earned; whereas, another Cleveland urban homesteader, working an acre may need to show revenue of $24K in order to be granted the land.

Cleveland's already way on the map and making its mark on the world in terms of urban food production and land re-use. However, being the first city in the United States to create urban homestead laws would be nothing short of revolutionary. It would empower people. It would help stabilize neighborhoods. And "gulp," it may even attract people to the city. And when I say people, I mean non-Ohioans.

Of course, I encourage all other cities to create their own urban homesteading laws. It's just that being that I farm in Cleveland, I would like Cleveland to do it first. Something like a homegrown revolution.

Old Husher's Marketing Materials

2011-02-16T09:02:00.019-05:00

If you live in Cleveland, and somewhat moderately pay attention to your surroundings (like you notice new graffiti every so often), and run around the single degree of separation that is also Cleveland, then you may have noticed some of my marketing materials here or there.

If not, I'm glad I have this chance to tell you all about them. First off, I invite you to take a mighty gander at them up top of this blog.

In order of appearance from top to bottom, you see the flyer for my "Produce Prepaids Program" that has affectionately synonymously morphed into my "Not-A-CSA" program; the classic and almost soldoutish "A Farm in Cleveland?!" t-shirt is next; and last but not least is the sentiment we're all feeling more and more these days, "CORPORATE FOOD STILL SUCKS," the sticker, which is soon to be followed by the t-shirt.

Currently, I'm most excited about the Produce Prepaids Program, aka the Not-A-CSA. That being said, the Prepaids are similar to a traditional CSA program in that the customer buys-in or prepays in advance for fresh produce in the future. Both systems create a commitment directly from customer to farmer/salesperson, or in my case directly from customer to me.

Now from there, the Prepaids are different from a traditional CSA program. I would like to take the chance right now to accentuate these differences. First off, my Prepaids are more affordable and therefore more accessible than other CSAs. The cost of the Prepaids is only $50, which is in stunning contrast to my peers'/competitors' cost that range from $400-$700.

Now that you know you can most likely afford it, and just like Devo's 1980 breakthrough album, I give the Prepaids "Freedom of Choice," which also differs from traditional CSAs.

My Prepaid customers have the freedom to choose the vegetables of their choice. I will not pre-determine/determine somebody's food-buying like other CSAs. My customers will not get sick of kale or bok choy unless they want to get sick of kale or bok choy. If my Prepaids need 10 pounds of canning tomatoes, then they got 10 pounds of canning tomatoes.

Furthermore, unlike other traditional/stuffy CSAs, my Prepaids are not locked into a singular/concrete pick-up day and time. Rather, my Prepaids have the freedom to choose their pickup time (within reason) at my Lakewood home in the detached garage when it is convenient for them. Micro-local delivery will also be available for a $2 delivery fee, which will be waived if the delivery is on the way to something else.

Because my Prepaids will only be inundated by my vegetables at their choosing, this gives my Prepaids additional freedoms like the ability to spread their wealth to other farmers and farmer's markets. My Prepaids can give Old Husher the brake for a couple of weeks/months. This is in the name of customer service and for my other urban farmer brethren.

Finally, because the Prepaids Program is cash-based versus time-based, a Prepaid customer's contract lasts only as long as there is cash in their account. A Prepaid customer will never feel "trapped" through an entire growing season like the traditional time-based CSAs. Once the $50 is spent, a Prepaid customer may move on (a very unlikely event), buy-in another $50, or simply agree to accept sales texts going into the future.

This brings me to my next outlier question. Exactly, how do I communicate veggie availability with my Prepaids? Availability will be communicated via sales texts when the produce comes available and will also be listed on Old Husher's Farm page when that comes into existence on Facebook later this month.

So to make the deal even sweeter, I'm running a special right now through February that a $50 prepay will actually buy a $60 credit. That's like a 20% bonus coupon!

Back in 2009 when this plan was first starting to come together, I would tell everybody I knew about it. Back then, there was a small group of individuals, who I was basically preaching to the converted about my would-be urban farm. But in general, most recipients of my farm diatribe would look confused and fairly often exclaimed, "A Farm in Cleveland?!" From this naturally occurring re-occurrence, my first logo was born in the form of nine-colored "A Farm in Cleveland?!" t-shirt.

Local artist, Stephe DK, was commissioned for the Cleveland mirror-image and my likeness design. From there, the design went to print at the National screen printer juggernaut, that is located right here in Cleveland, known as Jakprints. Because I believe men and womens' bodies are very differently shaped, I opted for both a man and woman's cut t-shirt. The woman's t-shirt is available in sizes small through extra-large, is 100% organic cotton, is made in the USA, is Bella brand, and is form fitting. The man's t-shirt is 100% cotton and made by Gildan. The man's t-shirt was selected based on what I found most in my drawer. It is also available from small through extra-large.

For me, the ultimate goal of the "A Farm in Cleveland?!" logo is for me to have helped change Cleveland and the subsequent National dialogue regarding Cleveland. I would like Cleveland's National "burning river" image to change a more appropriate "a farm in Cleveland!" with the question mark removed on purpose. There's enough of it happening here that it seems completely plausible to me.

If you'd like to get a hold of one of these t-shirts and wondering how, I am pleased to announce there are options. If you see me in Cleveland within this one degree of separation, chances are I'll have t-shirts (say at Gordon Square Farmer's Market or at my public speaking event at CSU tomorrow). They're $20. Also, the Root Cafe in Lakewood carries a stock of shirts, also for $20. Now beyond Cleveland, the t-shirts are $25 postage paid via Paypal. See below. Please indicate gender and size in the special instructions section.

Lastly, "CORPORATE FOOD STILL SUCKS" is a sentiment that's growing more and more everyday, especially with the recent presidential approval of Monsatan's genetically modified alfalfa, beets, and corn. If you see me around town, the stickers are free. Otherwise, the stickers are 3 for $2 postage paid . Also, via Paypal.

Ramblins

2011-02-09T09:02:00.004-05:00

I've been suffering a massive dose of writer's block this winter, which would be okay if I had nothing to say, or nothing was happening. However, the contrary is true, and I just feel stumped to type. So I'm a gonna attempt to force this one out in a non-linear train of thought fashion though I generally disdain others' blogs that write in this manner.

Wow, seems like yesteryear when it was last warm out in Cleveland, Ohio. Wait, it was yesteryear. December 31st to be exact. I took full advantage of an eight hour farm day to round out the year and "installed" something akin to a lasagna bed at a spot on the farm that somewhat naturally has a hole and a decline. I started off with a whole lotta corn tortillas as my carbohydrate base 'cause they always go stale in our household when we buy the 50 packs. Followed by the non-reusable yards bags of Autumn. Then several hundred pounds of formerly espresso-nated Loop coffee grinds were applied in a haphazard manner. Then the heavy lifting ensued with the courtesy of Birch and a trip to Rocky River Metropark, where we picked up a bunch of woodchips in Subee-1 for the next layer. We layered again with coffee grinds, fruits, and woodchips with subsequent Loop and Metropark trips accordingly. At that point, Birch was cashed out, but we still had light. So I picked up my other buddy, Gabe, and we drove to Leaf Humusville for 180 gallons of leaf humus for the final topping of last year. It was a great way to end 2010. Thanks Birch and Gabe.

We had another one of those Cleveland Farmer's Summits on the 14th of January. I formally tried to pass a motion to amend the name from "Cleveland Farmer's Meeting" to my way-preferred and in my opinion more stoic sounding "Cleveland Farmer's Summit." I'm pretty sure everybody thought I was joking because there was a chuckle and no dialogue ensued beyond that. So in my not-normally-passive aggressive way, I'm just gonna continue to refer to it as the Cleveland Farmer's Summit. And in my normally direct manner, I will bring it up again at the next Summit, which is scheduled for next week...Wednesday, I think. Gotta look that one up.

The theme for January's Summit was farm planning. Eric Stoffer of Bay Branch Farm and Peter McDermott of Urban Growth Farm both presented; whereas, I just spoke. I think I speak for most of us in attendance that we were pretty much drop-jaw and in-awe of Peter's ultra spreadsheet approach to planning with 1.3 times fudge factors, a detailed weekly CSA delivery schedule, a data-crunching breakdown per vegetable, and the like. This very much contrasted with my still developing "conceptual" approach to planning that mingles interesting sounding veggies with some sales projection hocus pocus on top of it. I'm not saying I don't use spreadsheets. I'm just saying I'm doing pre-algebra; and Peter's figuring out astral projection calculus; and also to his credit, Eric is like trig. At any rate, it was a great Summit, and it was encouraging to see some new folks.

I gotta new food addiction for the new year. Oddly enough, it's in stunning contrast to my other longtime running food addictions that include buffalo chicken wings (death to all other flavors, traitors!), western omelettes with cheese aka a Denver omelette, and a Dirty Greek Gyro (pork, fries, onions, mustard; plus, I get to say "I'll have a dirty Greek")from Greek Village Grille.

So drum roll, please. My latest food addiction is brussel sprouts! This is really weird, considering I cried at the age of 12 when my parents forced me to eat them. Besides the onion, the brussel sprout is the only vegetable to have made me cry. But like all good addictions, this one for brussel sprouts came in hard and fast, and seemingly out of nowhere. It all started about a year ago at Michael Symon's Lolita, where I got my first taste, fried in lard with capers, anchovies, and balsamic; I'm tremensing now typing about them. I had 'em a couple more times over the months, but I wouldn't say I became addicted until Decemberish at a dinner party hosted by the Origin Beanery folks, where the garlic roasted sprouts were the perfect compliment to the duck and squash pasta confit. Now a week doesn't go by without me craving and roasting some sprouts. I mostly keep to the routine of garlic, salt, and either bacon fat or avocado oil, just depending whether or not Sarah is looking over my shoulder whilst I cook. Sometimes, I "get crazy" with soy sauce or balsamic or something else mundane, but not often, and definitely not more than five ingredients.

This addiction is going so far that it has affected my conceptual farm planning this year. And despite them taking a ridiculous 110 days to mature, and taking up lots of space, and being bastard-aphid magnets, I plan on growing brussel sprouts this year. A variety called Long Island Improved. Yeah, the Chinese may be calling it the Year of the Rabbit, but for me, it's the Year of the Brussel Sprout. And if I catch a rabbit eating one of my Sprouts this year, then I may be vending some lucky rabbit's foots at my stand this summer.

On the Local Food Cleveland website last year, I started the Cleveland Farmers Buyers Club to achieve some economies of scale for us smaller urban growers. Last year, it existed without a lot of fanfare or hullabaloo or members. And let's face it, the members who joined were friends. I'm proud to say a year later the Cleveland Farmers Buyers Club has commenced it first group order with a purchase of 3,660 onion plants with nine participating buyers. In addition, the online Club is also starting to attract members whom I don't know. There's more and more sizzle everyday.

Cleveland recently made some awesome headlines as one of Yahoo's World's Most Visionary Cities for our urban farming, along with Abu Dhabi's off-the-grid Masdar City. Furthermore, the highlighted project for the article is Gardens Under Glass, where I just finished a brief hydroponics internship! Good Job, Vicky!

In other news, I've been helping the grassroots entity known as Gordon Square Farmers' Market, where I sale my produce, get all formal. We've been doing things like writing Articles of Incorporation, finding attorneys to review those Articles, and having meetings about how to formally go forward with a Board and By-Laws and the such. By becoming non-profit, it will allow Gordon Square Farmers' Market to proceed in a much more business-like fashion for things like insurance, grant opportunities, and perhaps a stipend for the market manager (which will never be me for clarifications sake).

Next week on the 17th, I'm doing a public speaking event at Cleveland State University. There are five Re-Imagining Cleveland Grantees and their projects being highlighted. I am to represent the for-profit, entrepreneurial spirit of urban farming and the Re-Imagining Grant. I am extremely excited about this opportunity to represent the for-profit urban farmer, who often gets condemnation and a drought of funding opportunities, because we do it for "ourselves," while technically trying to be sustainable and pay taxes. I believe socially responsible capitalism is where its at.

I think I'm done. I feel done. That felt like a pretty good ramblin. For sure, it's a load off my shoulders. I'm feeling better about typing again. I think those structured blogs on the back burner will be coming out soon. Look for some on Marketing and Local Food Sustainability 2.0 soon.

Seeking Inspiration Abroad: Palm Springs and Wooster

2010-12-21T16:57:00.012-05:00

On December 4 when winter kicked into extreme gear in Cleveland, me and the missus took off like the rest of the snowbirds to the sunny desert of Palm Springs, California, where a much welcomed vacation was enjoyed with cactus-scape and oasis hiking, margarita poolside sipping, tarantula encountering, mid-century furniture window shopping, and old friend hanging (thanks for making the drive, Scot, Todd, and Anya).

Though I didn't want to do anything farm related, I managed to knock out two blogs and made a visit to the Palm Springs "Certified" Farmer's Market, where I became even further impressed with my Cleveland farmer brethren. In California, the Land of Ag, I expected to find crazy-colored tomatoes, Asian greens, and even some new peppers. But what I found instead were pretty much standard veggie crops with two yellow exceptions: a carrot and a slicing tomato. Granted Palm Springs is not the cultural capital of California, but given all the mid-century furniture and propensity towards food trends, I expected a lot more in every way, shape, and form from the Palm Springs "Certified" Farmer's Market.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is way off this blog's beaten path, but it should be noted that every time something in our food distribution chain gets "certified" that it adds costs in terms of time and money to the farmer. One of the beauties about micro-scale farming is that the consumer can literally get to know their farmer and often the farm itself. This is me definitely being an idealist, but I feel a personal relationship/connection is worth more than any certification when it comes to our food chain.

Now don't get me wrong. There were some awesome sights. Oranges, lemons, and avocados were stacked high and were visually intriguing because we can't grow those fruits in Ohio.

My favorite stand sold nothing but value-added products. Bella Vado Splendid Oils are the end products of a family avocado farm east of San Diego. Homegrown and home-squeezed, Bella Vado offers bottled avocado oil, avocado, soap, and the avocado stick (lip balm). I've been showering with the unscented soap this week, and it's been nothing short of luxurious. I love the tiny bubbles. I also brought back a bottle of the oil, but have yet to open it. Regretfully, I didn't get the avocado stick, which would be really useful this time o' year in Cleveland.

In hindsight, what I liked about the Bella Vado operation beyond the ultra-personable-ness of family member/salesperson, Charissa, is that their products are probably the furthest thing than what anybody is doing here. It may exist, but I don't know anybody in NE Ohio that is micro-pressing any kind of oil at all, and definitely not to the point of creating value-added products. In that sense, Bella Vado was completely eye opening.

When I got back to snowy, blustery Cleveland, my attention quickly turned to the distribution bottleneck that so many of us urban farmers are presently facing. That attention traversed me to the furthest corners of southwestern NE Ohio to a big town called Wooster, Ohio in order to visit, shop, and get inspired at their working food co-op, Local Roots.

Upon entering Local Roots, it all seemed too easy. There was the value-added to the left and left-back of the store, starting with soaps and balms and changing to dried beans, canned salsas, and sorghum and maple syrups. In the center, there was the fresh produce with husk cherries, every color of potato, apples, chestnuts and so forth. The right-back of the store was a coffee stand, serving small batch roasted cups of coffee. The right wall was lined with freezers and coolers, full of meats, cheeses, milks, and eggs. I bought some thick-cut bologna and Hartzler's Egg Nog. Then the right-front not on the wall was an assortment of fresh baked goods from vegan what-nots to gluten-free whatevers to Christmas cookies to kolachis. Let me emphasize that none of these products came from more than 50 miles away!

In order to shop at Local Roots, you need not be a member. However, in order to sell, membership is required at a cost of $50 or five labor volunteer hours. Producers set their own prices with Local Roots getting a flat 10% of sales. Sales are tracked with a semi-elaborate UPC code system that purportedly costs about $400. Shoppers tag their own produce with the correct UPC code sticker so that sales are rung up accordingly. Now getting back to membership, a shopper may also become a member for $50 a year or $1,000 for a lifetime. This entitles the member to a proceed of the profits, if and when there are profits.

It should also be mentioned that the visible walls were plastered with one page farm bios of all the participating producers. This created a familiar atmosphere that really drove the "local" home. Again, Local Roots made it seem all too easy, and way too organized. I wondered, could Clevelanders cooperatively do anything? Furthermore, could we replicate something like Local Roots in Cleveland?

When making my pilgrimage down to Wooster, I specifically had two storefronts on my mind as potential Cleveland Co-op candidates. Coincidentally and independently of my pro co-op consultation, one of these storefront owners came to the same conclusion about starting a local food co-op in Cleveland with their storefront after visiting Local Roots a week prior to my visit. No convincing was needed. As for the other storefront, that's a big fat "we'll see." I believe Cleveland could support multiple local food co-ops, but it always takes that initial risk taker to first dip their toes in the freezing water of Lake Erie.

For the Record

2010-12-08T21:16:00.006-05:00

Ever since I've started to engage in urban farming, a lot of people have had a lot of questions for me, a lot of them personal. They're the kind of questions that people may discuss with their good friends, but not relative strangers. But with the visible-ness and subsequent openness of urban farming, the public seems nonchalantly inclined to regularly put me through a series of par for the course questioning. What this boils down to are inquiries about farm revenues and personal finances.

So here it goes for the record. Like Wikileaks, I believe in full disclosure. I will attempt to answer these questions and divert the public to my blog when they come up in the future.

So, Old Husher how much money did you make this first year farming? Personally, I made nothing. The farm had veggie revenues just under $2K and t-shirt sales of $500. All of these monies went straight back into my company, Green Urban Enterprises. Obviously, $2K is not enough to live on even by cheap ol' Cleveland standards. Considering however, I only grew on 1,900 square feet of my 17,000 available, AND I actually sold within city limits (not to yuppies in the 'burbs), AND I didn't have a spring crop because of Cleveland's temporary cease and desist, AND I wasn't set-up to accept assistance this year, AND I do this without a partner, then my $2K is actually quite a feat that I'm exceptionally proud of.

So, Old Husher why'd you only grow on a fraction of your land this year? This boiled down to time constraints. Though the city granted me funding for a fence, this meant nothing in terms of city zoning. It was total bureaucratic left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing. Much of my summer was spent down at city hall trying to get my fence for which the city had already granted me money to get. As a one man band, if I'm down at city hall, then I'm not farming.

Old Husher, what do you mean by "one man band?" Doesn't your wife help? What I mean by "one man band" is that I do 98% of all the work myself. From seed selection to seed starting to planting to pruning to weeding to harvesting to processing to selling, it's generally all me. That being said, I do have a small crew of volunteers that help somewhat regularly. This crew consists of Mike Birchler, Kevin "Glutton" Orr, and Jessica Julian. For them being in my life and on my farm, I'm eternally grateful. Please note, there is no reference to my wife, Sarah Husher, within this crew. Instead, she works a full time job with benefits and a part time job as a yoga instructor, which ultimately has awarded me the financial freedom necessary to get this farm off the ground. And just like my crew, but for obviously different and varied reasons, I'm eternally grateful for having Sarah in my life despite her not "helping" specifically on the farm.

Old Husher, do you own the land you farm on? As it stands right now, I don't own my farm land. I have two separate landlords. The first is the City of Cleveland, who I have a five year, zero dollar lease with. My other landlord is the Bellaire Puritas Development Corporation, who I have an annual lease with that costs several hundred dollars more than the one with Cleveland. Ultimately, I would like to own my farm land, as this would offer me and my business more security. I need about $9K for the Bellaire Puritas property, and even given that money I still need to prove to them that I'm serious about this urban farm stuff before they're willing to sell it to me. The Cleveland Land Bank property is up in the air, whether or not Cleveland is willing to sell. Basically as I understand it, if Cleveland has a better development opportunity for my farm, then they're gonna jump on that, and my farm is kaput. It's not exactly the sterling guarantee that I'd like for the longevity of my farm, but it's the best I can do for now.

Old Husher, what kind on money did it take to get this all started? Well, I'm a firm believer that an urban farm in the Rust Belt can be started for about $1K. However, I got my farm started with substantially more money. My first cash infusion came in the form of a grant called Re-Imagining Cleveland. This was a grant for $7.5K and was actually part of Obama's Stimulus. These Obama monies got used up quickly, mostly on my fence and storage container. Sarah and I also lent my company $4K so that Green Urban Enterprises could have working capital for things like business cards, insurance, and rent money. Of the $4K, Green Urban Enterprises has paid back $500 so far. It would have been an even grand, but this laptop I'm typing on right now took precedence over Sarah and I.

So that's about it. I've fielded these questions so many times I've felt it necessary to right this blog. If you have any other questions for me, please feel free to ask.

The First Cleveland Farmer's Summit

2010-12-06T18:14:00.003-05:00

On December 1, the day winter came again to Cleveland, I participated in the First Annual/Seasonal/Monthly Cleveland Farmer's Summit. The event was organized by Ms. Molly Murray at the OBOE Building on Lake Avenue. Though the email invite was extensive, the actual turnout was sparse. With a few exceptions (namely Lynn Rodeman, Eco Village Produce, and Blue Pike Farm), you could say the attendees were the hardcore, Cleveland farmers. There was Peter McDermott and his partner Virginia, George Remington, Eric Stoffer and Annabel Khouri, Erin "Mean Bean" Laffay, myself, and Molly. Refreshments consisted of homemade chai tea with Hartzler's milk, whose cream separated and froze, and I ate. Which had I left after eating the frozen glob of sweet cream, I would have left satisfied. But instead I stayed for the entire Summit and left extremely satisfied and completely energized.

Molly put together a formal forum that consisted of discussion based around successes, what we wanted to learn in the future, and our vision for this whole urban farming thing. What surprised me the most was the array of answers. About half the attendees (not me) wanted to scale up their operations to multiple acres and outside the city. I found this a little disheartening because I've always felt urban farming is about urban growth (especially in the Rust Belt), and one of our main competitive advantages as urban farmers is our closeness to our markets. But to each their own, not everybody likes rock n roll and independent restaurants. Molly iterated the need for cooperative buying, as we all buy our stuff from relatively the same places and because it's exceptionally difficult to buy basic farm goods like straw bales within city limits.

In terms of successes, I am excited to just have made it through my first year. Others named specific crops like carrots or arugula. But in general, we focused on what we all wanted to learn. I always pick mundane things like greens handling/processing/storage and drip irrigation; whereas, Peter McDermott threw out there some way bigger fishes like total farm planning (with an implied emphasis on spreadsheets). This became the great white whale of the evening and is the formal topic of our next Summit in January.

Erin Laffay presented the most refreshing perspectives of the evening. She's taken a page from the Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative down in Athens and subsequently grows staple foods. This year she grew on a 900 square foot plot, dedicated to nothing but beans. What's refreshing about this is how Erin is completely bucking the high dollar veggie trend and is instead opting for high protein/high fiber/easily stored goods that typically do not bring in those high dollars. In case of the 2012 Zombie Apocalypse, we're going to need Erin's beans much more than anybody's arugula or carrots. And for that, Erin, I salute you.

Going home that evening, I found a certain comfort in knowing/learning that all of us are fairly still new to this urban farming thing, even the two-year seasoned veterans. My slight insecurities in terms of benchmarking against my peers completely went away after this meeting. I feel more secure and comfortable than ever with my farm and myself, and for that I'm grateful to have attended the First Cleveland Farmer's Summit. Here's to growth and the future.

Local Vegetable of the Couple of Days: A Concept

2010-11-17T09:22:00.020-05:00

On Tuesday, November 16th, I had the chance to attend my first City Club of Cleveland event to hear Michael Shuman give a presentation of the Northeast Ohio Local Food Assessment and Plan. After having been to a fair amount of these kinds of events, they tend to blur a bit. The message is similar, "we can feed ourselves with local food and earn a buck while doing it." And the concrete examples of what else we can be doing right now are always fuzzy.

I'm not sure how much money this Assessment cost Northeast Ohio, but I personally believe that if all these Foundations and Governments actually spent money on building infrastructure for urban farmers (like a city tractor) or seed money (not long term subsidies) for urban farmers, instead of these wine and cheese Assessments, then we'd already have a lot more local food (and subsequent money in our Northeast Ohio economy). The exact same can be said for the much talked about wind mills in Lake Erie. I would much prefer to put a couple of windmills of various styles and platforms in the Lake, and then figure out what went right and wrong, versus all of these years of studies, cash drains, and missed learning curves. But alas! I am not a politician. I am a farmer.

That being said, there were a couple of take home points from Mr. Shuman. The first being that on average 73 cents of every dollar spent in the USA on food is for shipping. That's totally crazy! We all need to help end these unnaturally created oil subsidies and start buying local food. The second major take home point was that of creating a regional stock-like exchange for local food companies and farmers. For example, if 50,000 Ohioans bought one $100 share, that would be $5,000,000 to get some businesses incubated and off the ground. It's just then, who plays Dictator and decides which businesses get seed money? In my opinion, the grant process is heavily slanted towards white liberal arts majors, and therefore by design excludes many inner city, lower-income folks.

Given all of that prefacing, I am definitely a hypocrite, if at this time I don't provide some kind of a relatively concrete example of what else can be done right now. I came up with this idea on my drive from home to farm in Subee-1 with the Melvins blaring a couple weeks ago. I tend to do my best thinking that way.

What I am suggesting is a simple expansion of the vegetable of the day concept that somewhat already exists within American restaurant culture. My lofty expansion of the concept is the "Local Vegetable of the Couple of Days." Now let me explain how this concept would/could work.

The two main parties involved would be independent restaurants and urban farmers. And the restaurant-going public would hopefully be willing/gracious participants in this grand plan. Basically, the plan works like this. Urban farmers sell produce to restaurants on some kind of regular/irregular basis. Then the restaurants make a special dish as the "local vegetable of the couple of days" until that vegetable gets eighty-sixed. I know this sounds like what some farmers and restaurants are doing already. So I will further explain how the "local vegetable of the couple of days" concept is different from a farmer just selling to a restaurant.

First, I'll present the farmer point of view, followed by my perceived restaurant point of view.

Most of us understand that the urban farmer is dealing with an unique set of circumstances, the most limiting being the size of our plots; and in Cleveland, we have real seasonality that will sometimes make your lettuce go to seed in May. If you add to these facts that we're all relatively new to this, blight/pests, and a random x factor, then it's easy to understand how us, urban farmers, may have a hard time fulfilling a standing restaurant order, like delivering five pounds of Bibb lettuce per week to whatever restaurant from March through November. An urban farmer specializing in Bibb lettuce could pull this task off, but most of us like to be general garden plant growers and not mono-crop specialists like the Ag Industry that we're trying not to emulate.

Now furthering the urban farmer point of view, a lot of us are freaks and general plant enthusiasts that like to grow non-traditional wild-style crops even beyond the general garden varieties. I'm talking veggies like, scorzonera, jerusalem artichokes, baby bok choys, mizuna, mexican sour gherkins, etc. These kinds of veggies are hard sales in food desserts, where we're trying to get the residents to even engage in American staples like tomatoes and carrots.

So presently these amazing wild-style crops basically don't have a readily available people-based market place in the Midwest. Don't get me wrong, there are people, like John McGovern who buys two pounds of baby bok choy to make his own kim chee (pictured), but Mr. McGovern is more the exception to the rule. Even something fairly standard like arugula can be a hard sale to the public. This is where the restaurant becomes of particular value and use to the urban farmer.

At this point, the stage has been set from the urban farmer's point of view. I will now switch gears to my perceived restaurant point of view. In Cleveland, it appears that there are at least 50 restaurants willing/wanting to purchase local produce. In general, many of these restaurants could be classified as foo-foo. They have their game established. They know how many salads are ordered on a weekend evening and so forth. Regularity of work flow right down to the weekly vegetable ordering is how these restaurants function.

This is where the local vegetable of the couple of days concept provides a perfect segue between the irregular, wild-style urban farmer and the regular, foo-foo restaurant. It creates a somewhat regular forum for the restaurant/chef to showcase local varieties of produce as well as their own talents with a changing cast of a main local ingredient. It would be like they're iron cheffing it every couple of days, when the random farmer comes with a random 10 pounds of quality produce for sale. Then the Master Chef has to do something special with it, as the "Local Vegetable of the Couple of Days."

At the restaurant level this could be featured as a write-in portion on the menu, a permanent portion of the menu that says something like, "just ask about the Local Vegetable of the Couple of Days," a chalkboard/dry-erase board, or on the uber hip Ipad menu. If and when there are times without a local vegetable, simply remove it from the menu, and then call us, Cleveland farmers, out in some kind of public forum, and I'm pretty sure we'll be able to get you something good by night fall. As word of mouth goes, if you're a restaurant participating in the local vegetable of the couple of days concept, I'm also pretty sure us, farmers, will be able to find you and keep you fairly stocked.

I want to re-emphasize that the local vegetable of the couple of days concept is not to replace how current restaurants are currently buying from local producers, much like Julie of Root Cafe and Mike of Bar Cento. The concept is to supplement this already regular buying by the local food restaurant pioneers and to fully embrace it as a concept such that it creates a whole 'nother level of Cleveland food identity, where the buying public comes to recognize it and wonders if at their next restaurant visit there will be a local vegetable of the couple of days and how disappointing if that restaurant does not.

My personal favorite about all of this is that it takes no money or additional infrastructure changes. The farmers are there. The restaurants are there. There are already restaurants buying from us farmers. It's literally just a few more words to what a lot of restaurants are already doing. This concept is to further our food cultural identity by formally creating and featuring the "local vegetable of the couple of days." That's it.

Now a funny couple of things have happened to me since first starting to pen this essay. The grand result has been a lightning bolt to the head of re-realization of how important getting the local food scene out to the general public is.

One of those things actually occurred at the Shuman presentation when Dr. Ryan Terry pledged right then and there $25K out of his own pocket to get the regional food stock exchange started. At that moment, I realized that there are always various ways of communicating. Different crowds need different inputs. And if the City Club forum has the ability to have pulled off the beginnings of a local regional food based stock exchange, then that's pretty cool.

The second happened on the public forum of Facebook, at like-site for Project Orange Thumb, which is a grant opportunity from Fiskar's, the international hand tool company with the orange handles. When I asked about why the grant was not available for the for-profit urban farmer (based on the fact that I met every "community" criteria other than trying to be for-profit)? The Fiskar's rep responded on FB "I wasn't aware that there were for-profit urban farmers." SHEEESH! This is a huge international company that sells in Home Depot that isn't even aware that there is a for-profit urban farm movement. The need for education feels as great as ever. Good job Mr. Shuman and the Northeast Ohio Food Assessment. We're obviously all still getting there.

To check out the Fiskar's dialogue on FB and to see what I've done for the community in the last nine months (really is a good summary), go to:

http://www.facebook.com/#!/ProjectOrangeThumb

What a Slacker Blogger's Been Doing Lately

2010-10-24T17:14:00.019-04:00

About a week ago, my old friend, Sean Carnage of seancarnage.com, called me out in the public forum of Facebook about my slow-down in blogs. I assure all of you the slow-down has not been for naught. All that infrastructure that I've been writing about for months all came to a glorious head in the months of September and October. When I say infrastructure, I will clarify. I now have my fence. I now have my storage container. And on a personal note, I have a brand new driveway and garage!

So I've been doing my part for the economy. Some of you may read that last paragraph and say, "that's wonderful." And it is wonderful, but for those three separate jobs of fence, storage container, and new garage, I had to deal with no less than eight separate contractors plus the Teamsters. The thing I've learned about contractors over the last two months is that they're only on time when it comes to asking for a check. What this amounted to was being held hostage, as contractors don't seem to have a day-to-day comprehensive plan. Instead, they ask some critical question that should have been determined several weeks prior every two to eight hours for every day on the job.

Take for instance that first ever video on The Garden Life and Times of Justin Husher, which was shot, directed, and executively produced by Birch, with some Apple product. Now this video shows me in desperate times, a man beaten by nature. I was tasked with the removal of 12 wooden fence posts on a rainy Thursday so that the fence guys could put their subsequent other fence posts in on Friday. Now being that these contractors bid these jobs from paper proposals without ever having been to the job site, how were they to know these old posts were in their way? And subsequently, personally, how was I suppose to know that these fence posts were in their way, or that I (and not them) was responsible for removing these posts, being that these contractors never came out to the farm?

So when the fence guys finally did get out there and were finally putting their posts in, the process came to a halt on the south side of the farm when the fence guys informed me that the wooden posts were in their way AND that it was not their job to remove them. I scrambled calling everybody I knew for help. Like the ol' reliable that he is, Birch came to the rescue. First, we tried digging the posts out, then digging plus sledge-hammering, then digging plus sledge-hammering plus drilling posts into the fence posts to give us a better grip. Through these processes, we were able to extract five posts in two hours and were feeling broken.

Of course, that's when Subee-1 came to the rescue. Basically, Subee-1 became a battering ram extraordinaire. What we hoped to accomplish with 50 sledge-hammerings was completed with one or two rams from Subee-1. Subee-1 so thoroughly loosened the fence posts, we no longer had to do any digging, and the posts literally just pulled on up. The last seven posts came out in an hour. I encourage everybody to check out the minute long video, and if you're a National Marketing Manager for Subaru of USA, then it's a must.

As of now, the fence is completed. It looks great. Sterling Fence did a great job and were a pleasure to work with despite the last minute scrambling. The Federal bidding process for my Stimulus dollars saved me and my grant a lot of money, which ultimately allowed me to afford my shed, which is actually a re-purposed storage container.

For the record, I want to thank Randie Kuhn of OSU Extension. Because without her, the Re-Imagining Cleveland Grant would be and would have been nothing.

Now back to the shed, I opted for the re-purposed storage container instead of your run-of-the-mill shed because I didn't want it to get stolen. This is Cleveland, and entire 10 by 10 sheds have disappeared overnight. Given all of the horror stories about the neighborhood from the mouth of Pete Gagepro across the street, I wanted something secure, and a flimsy ol' vinyl shed from Home Depot wasn't gonna cut it.

At this point, I obviously now have my shed, but it too had its share of prep work. There were two days of weedy tree removal, performed with a calorie-burning handsaw and not a gas-burning chainsaw. However in hindsight and for future applications, a chainsaw would be welcomed. There was the two days of site prep, which included the tilling and leveling the area one day, and spreading and leveling four tons of lime stone the next.

However I would have given thrice the site prep for the paint prep, which there were five days of and really sucked. These five days could be roughly broke down into two days of scraping/removing Hyundai decals, a day of sanding/rust removal, a day of using gnarly solvents to get rid of the leftover sticky of the decals, and a day of Rustoleum priming coupled with a Dr. Bronner's light hempen soap bath.

The painting was fairly easy with each coat taking about a half day per application. I got a lot help with the actual painting. Lisa Carlini of Origins Beanery is featured in the action photo above. My long term vision for the shed includes painting the mural of my logo on the front and a DIY green roof on top.

Whilst all this was happening, the farm stuff on the farm didn't magically take a leave of absence, and Gordon Square Farmer's Market just ended for the season on October 30th. For the last market, I had paddy pans, mizuna, baby bok choys, radishes, basil, and sundrieds. Though in the middle of October, I still had eggplants, tomatoes, and peppers. I feel fairly accomplished in my late season offerings as I didn't use any kind of season extenders.

And whilst all the all of this was happening, I still had to break down and plant in for the season. My 17 pounds of garlic was literally just planted and mulched on Halloween weekend. The sunchokes got in the week before that.

I'm almost at a critical rest for the year. Basically, all I need to do is one last seasonal mow, which should happen later on today. When I write "critical rest," I refer to things that I have to do and not those I still want to and can do this year. I've liberated 36 yard bags of leaves so far for my farm composting. I would like to make it an even 100. Again, it's not critical, but I'd like to do it.

Going in to the winter future, I promise I will try to write more. I have a million topics to write about: trains of thought, my first season reflections, cultural critiques, advertisements, reporting on wine and cheese events, etcetera. Speaking of wine and cheese, it feels like there's a local food event everyday here in Cleveland. I went to two events last week and will be checking out another two this week. The beauty is the fervor-ed pitch is coming from all corners of the city, de-localized and de-centralized.

Needing a winter time activity other than surfing Australia, I'm also in deep contract negotiations with Gardens Under Glass to come aboard and learn hydroponic gardening in the Galleria of downtown Cleveland this winter. Last of all, Green Urban Enterprises may be going to court and suing over a purchase of a faulty piece of machinery bought earlier in the season. We'll have to see on that one, but I was hoping to avoid litigation as long as possible as part of my business practices. It's a shame that there are con-artists in the world.

That's what a slacker blogger's been doing lately.

Local Foods Week Cleveland

2010-10-13T08:52:00.012-04:00

From October 2nd to the 10th, we celebrated the first hopefully annual Local Foods Week in Cleveland, where Cleveland Foodies were instigated into taking on the "Eat Local Challenge" that comprised of three harrowing tasks. Task 1 was to eat a local meal a day and post photos (of which I'm trying to comply now). Task 2 was to attend a local food event. And Task 3 was to support local farmers, farm markets, and restaurants.

Obviously, I personally accepted the challenge and won! However, it was not the elegant, graceful win that I had hoped for. Prior to Local Foods Week, I had imagined lush daily meals made with subsequent daily trips for farmer market goods. This week-long culinary epic horizon was crushed with the eight-pound shoulder that I slow barbequed, mopped, and pulled (pic 1) over apple and oak logs for six and a half hours on October 1st in celebration of rock band, La Otracina, making their way through Cleveland for the first time in two years. The shoulder was from a non-certified organic Creston, Ohio hog that I bought half of several weeks ago. Those french fries in the picture are Yukon golds from the Farm.

Though La Otracina are skinny Brooklynites, they ate wholeheartedly that evening, as did other musical luminaries like Lightning Fingers and Josh Snuff. October 2nd was the "official" start of Local Foods Week, and we (me, Sarah, and Otracina) partook in the Challenge with non-vinegared and instead chili powdered pulled pork breakfast burritos (pic 2) with purple onions from Old Husher's Farm, Morgan Farm Stay eggs, organic herbed cheese bought from a Amish Go-Between at a LEAF event this summer, and leftover bacon-mashed pinto beans from Rose Angel on W 58th. The condiments were Texas Pete Hot Sauce from North Carolina, Chipolte Tabasco from Avery Island, Louisiana, and Cholula from our brothers and sisters in Mexico. Day One, check.

Day Two was my favorite individual day of Local Foods Week. This is because I cooked the least and ate the best that day. Eating the best came as a courtesy from Lakewood's most aggro farmers, Bay Branch Farm. Yep, Annabel and Eric opened up their home and hearth for us heathens. The table-spread picture above (pic 3) is from the Bay Branch Party. My personal fave was the Yukon Gold potato salad with arugula accents (both grown at Bay Branch). However, Sarah begged to differ and preferred the beet salad (more Bay Branch produce) with the Lake Erie Creamery Chevre. I cooked up a pair of blue hubbard pies (pic 4) from the farm, and though there were three pumpkin pies, mine was the first to go. This probably had more to do with the fact that we brought a spatula and drew first slice, rather than some competitive tasting, as Ryan Kennedy's pumpkin pie was no less delicious. The chit-chat was great and ultimately devolved into subject matter relating to the competitive state of urban farming in Cleveland, Ohio. Day Two, check.

Day Three was a mellow day for me and Local Foods Week. Remember that eight pound shoulder and the other blue hubbard pie? Day Three, check.

Day Four was another no-cook day for me, but that evening I went to the Growhio Web Launch party. Thereby, completing Task 2. And since the Party was graciously catered with tasty treats from Flying Fig and Ohio City Burrito with a conscious effort to include locally grown food in the offerings, I was able to get my local foods meal in that day. Growhio's mission statement "is to increase demand for local food products and services by acting as an educational resource for information seekers, consumers, and future local food participants." Not only that, I'm "supposed to be" Growhio's first featured farmer with a question and answer style interview. Considering that Old Husher's Farm is not mentioned even as a link on the Growhio site yet, I'm starting to wonder if that "supposed to be" has fallen to the wayside. I should probably follow up with them on that. Regardless, Day Four and Task 2, check.

Day Five was Wednesday, hump day. It came with its own little micro-challenge, to eat at a restaurant that regularly buys from local farmers, of which there are probably about 10 to 20 of these restaurants in the area. Right here in my little village of Lakewood, Ohio is Root Cafe. Root is a coffee shop with an amazing beer and food selection. They buy from five or six separate farmers in the area, including Bay Branch. As you can guess, Day Five was another no-cook day with my local meal being provided by my pizza lunch at the Root (pic 5). Day Five, check.

Day Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine went a little something like this: pulled pork sandwich, followed by another breakfast burrito, followed by more pulled pork, then some Italian sausage from that same hog with some purchases from Gordon Square Farmer's Market on Day Eight and little snacks of blue hubbard pie peppered throughout those days. This was kind of an uneventful way of concluding the First Annual Local Foods Week Cleveland. But when you do a whole shoulder, it's best to eat it all.

Right now in Cleveland, we're celebrating our 2nd Annual Beer Week. Last year, the Week was hardly a murmur, meaning I didn't know it existed until after it was over. This year's Beer Week has a ridiculous amount of events and brewers flying in from all over the country. Sarah and I indulged in a food and beer pairing at the Beer Engine that matched 15 of Boulder's Avery beers with 15 petite courses. My favorite pairing was the sour beers with the stinky cheeses, which are two food groups that I generally dislike, but completely synergized together. The word on the street from the Cleveland Beeries is that this 2nd Beer Week has "blown up" from last year. Let's hope the same for next year's 2nd Annual Local Foods Week.

Paw Paw Fest 2010!

2010-09-22T11:24:00.007-04:00

Last weekend on September 17-19, I had the pleasure of attending my second Paw Paw Fest outside of Athens, Ohio. These trips down to Athens are becoming way ritualistic: the Skyline Chili pre-visit in Canal Winchester, Ohio, the comfortable log cabin accomodations, the mandatory purchases at the Athens Farmer's Market, the dinner trip to Casa Neuva, even seeing my buddy, Scot's mom's equestrian friend, Jane for two years in a row, and rock n roll at the Union, where coincidentally Cleveland's Self Destruct Button played this year.

So our hosts, Sarah Harter and Adam Hughes, have been a couple for a longggg time. And I'm proud to say that I was able to give them their first his and hers matching t-shirts, those being "A Farm in Cleveland?!" Adam took to his right away, wearing it to Paw Paw Fest on Saturday, where the positive re-enforcements came in the way of mega-compliments, even landing one from Warren Taylor, the Dairy Evangelist of Snowville Creamery. Sarah seems to be still warming up to hers however...

Now prior to getting down to Athens last weekend, Adam had called me and gave me the foreboding news that "his" paw paw patches were barren, and basically there were no signs of paw paws either: no flowers, no raccoon scat, no seeds, no rotting remnants.

In my quest to be the Paw Paw Ambassador of Cleveland, I've taken it upon myself to literally bring paw paws to the people in the form of education and as of this year actual paw paws. But the lack of forage-able paw paws made my task a daunting and potentially costly one. Upon midday arrival at the Fest, I immediately started scoping out paw paw prices, wondering could I get a bushel, a peck, or some other obscure large quantity. And the astounding unanimous answer to that wonderment was a definitive "NO!"

Peterson's Paw Paws and Chris Chmiel's Integration Acres were the major retailers at the Fest. Peterson's is the old man on the paw paw block. I'm not sure where they're from or how long they've been doing it, but the general consensus is longer than anybody else. Peterson's acts as both a grafted paw paw tree stock nursery with several proprietary grafted strains like the Susquehanna (my fave) and as a retailer of those high end paw paws. At $10 a pound, Peterson's looked like they were going to be sold out by Sunday. Integration Acres was selling theirs at $6 for a quart box, which was a slightly more affordable option, but still a very far cry from any kind of bulk pricing.

Last year I spent a considerable amount of time at the academic lectures. Whereas this year, I went with more of leisurely approach to hanging out at the Fest. The one presentation that did catch my undivided attention was "Sustainable Staple Foods." The presenters were the Appalachian Staple Foods Collaborative and/or the Shagbark Seed and Mill Company. These folks are the same people doing several different things and most of the content last weekend was on the Shagbark Seed and Mill Company.

From what I got out of the lecture, Shagbark's main goal as a business is to provide processing infrastructure to support small-scale staple food farmers in areas like milling and threshing with ultimate ideals of creating food independence for Appalachia. One of my favorite quotes of the lecture was to the effect, "You heard of the Tea Party? Well, we're forming the opposite of that called the Eat Party with food security being our primary mission!" All this talk about food, I should probably mention the crops that Shagbark was touting. These were amaranth, heirloom corn, turtle beans, and spelt. To my surprise, there were no mention of potatoes or sunchokes.

One familiar story Shagbark told was that of "farming acres." This is an alternate reality that us, urban farmers simply don't have. I believe it adds another conundrum to at least my urban farming hypothesis. Conceptually, I want to grow staple foods and feed the world. Economically however, I have to grow what earns my best return for my amount of work. Ideally, I'd like to be a fence-walker and do a bit of both. However, this is not a blog of conceptualizations! This is a blog about about Paw Paw Fest 2010! And that brings me to the uncertainty I was feeling after the lecture, as we were going into Saturday evening without bulk paw paws on the horizon. I believe Adam sensed it.

He expressed re-assuring sentiments that he was sure there were paw paws out there, either on some nether region of his land, or elsewhere places not yet explored, and that I would go back with paw paws for the people of Cleveland.

On Sunday we opted not to go back to Paw Paw Fest, but instead to go on a Quest for El Pawpawrado, the legendary City of Lost Paw Paws to us, gringos, guarded by the voracious Pawsquatch. We loaded up the Toyota Land Cruiser with baskets, teepee, a week's worth of food, a satellite phone, and other necessary survival implements. At daybreak, we were off to find El Pawpawrado with black coffee as our fuel and visions of paw paws as our spiritual guide.

After fording the Tuscarawas, Athens, and Muskingum Rivers, we parked the Land Cruiser next to an abandoned barn and trash heap. We lost our horses in the Muskingum; so from there, we'd have to go by foot. After matchete-ing through six hours of wild roses, poison ivy, and other very burr-y wonders of nature, we found El Pawpawrado. There, we were blinded with the emerald light shining through the majestic paw paw leaves, as if we were in Tron and everything glowed highlighter green instead of highlighter blue. After a couple hours of tree climbing, tree shaking, and simple picking of the low-hanging fruit, we had filled our baskets with 23 ripe and underripe pounds of glorious, custardy, pawpawee flesh. I would not go back to Cleveland empty handed! We left all overripe and quite ripe paw paws as an offering to the woodland critters and Pawsquatch.

After dividing the bounty with my Sherpa and Junior Associate, Ryan Kennedy, I was left with 15 pounds for the retail markets of the greater Cleveland area. I sold five pounds yesterday at $8 a pound. So I'm at the break even point in terms of gas. The demand seems unreal. Here's to new rituals.

AUGUST WAS INSANE

2010-09-09T09:05:00.010-04:00

And September continues to be the same. The last blog I went on about maggots a bit and never really got to the insanity that was August. So today, I will continue that blog (now in the past tense). But before I do, I just want to go back to the maggots for a moment. It turns out if you look really hard or increase the size of that top image, then YOU CAN SEE THE MAGGOTS IN THE BONEMEAL! YAY!

Five trips downtown to City Hall, countless hours later, fourteen bucks for parking, $150 for permit fees and associated costs, a $35 parking ticket, and a Board of Zoning Appeals hearing, I HAVE MY FENCE PERMIT! YAY! After all that, you may think that I'd be getting a 10 foot fence with barbwire and machine gun turrets, but no actually, it's five foot black vinyl mesh. I give major thanks and appreciation to City Council President Sweeney and Melissa Miller of Bellaire-Puritas Development Corporation. Both had my back at the Zoning Appeals hearing and literally went to town for me. Without them, I'd probably be a fenceless farmer exposed to the wilds of Cleveland. I give my apologies to Pete of GagePro across the street, who acted as a friend and then blindsided me with an objection letter to the Board against my fence, against my business, and against my person.

So Pete, I'm sorry. I got my fence. Considering you have literally zero green space on your completely blacktopped property and considering that preservation of green space was one of your five objection reasons, then I suggest to you that you green up your own land and property, and leave me personally be.

If there ever was a time to soapbox, for me personally, now is it. Everybody and anybody, who cares at all about urban farming in general and specifically urban farming in Cleveland, needs to call their Council Person and let them know you support the Urban Agriculture Overlay (UAO). In a nutshell, the UAO will create usage zoning that will allow us, Cleveland Urban Farmers, such farming amenities as hoophouses and fences without all of the fuss I just described. An urban farmer could farm with relative startup ease if the UAO passes. The UAO will also help to set National precedent for other cities to create similar urban farming zoning. It's easy getting a hold of City Council. Just copy and paste from below.

http://www.clevelandcitycouncil.org/Home/CouncilMembers/tabid/59/Default.aspx

Now to get off my soapbox, I'll tell you some more about August 2010. Besides melons, maggots, maneuvering, and grant writing, there was and still are tomatoes, lots and lots of them. I've taken the non-business zen approach to tomato quantity calculation, and all I can say again is there are lots and lots of them. I just filled my 100th half ounce bag of dehydrator dried sundrieds. I do know it takes a half pound of tomatoes to create a half ounce of sundrieds. So that's 50 pounds of just sundrying types of tomatoes right there. Then there's the quarts of sauce, and all the sales. I wake up in the middle of night, thinking of ways to keep the tomatoes flowing. In general, I use FIFO, an accounting acronym that means first-in, first-out. At the Market, I sell 'em individually, any tomato for a quarter, or in a brown bag bundle for $2.50 to $3.50. Some of the ultra-cool/high demand tomatoes like the Green Zebra only get brown bag bundled. Selling tomatoes in August was a difficult business challenge that I feel I ultimately won. Experimenting with pricing models was crucial and having someone like Sarah Perkins, who is literally the Cookie Monster of Tomatoes, on my side also helped tremendously.

With all those melons and tomatoes, it's no wonder my house became a fruit fly resort for a little while. Additional sweet sweet news is that Cleveland formally awarded me the Gardening for Greenbacks Grant for $3K. Thank you, Cleveland. I also gave my first urban farmer interview with Elizabeth Emery of Growhio. I will be Growhio's first featured farmer on their almost revamped website. I had my first shared farmer market stand with Central Roots selling luscious greens. In hindsight, August seems like it was an incredibly productive month. September is shaping up to be the same with the shed installation and site prep, including moving and spreading four tons of limestone later on today for the base of my shed. Then, there'll be the shed painting project...

For me, one thing at a time wins the race.

AUGUST IS INSANE

2010-08-21T16:38:00.007-04:00

Like the title says above, August has been and is insane. Starting with some gross news. Who knew that when bone meal gets wet, it becomes rancid? All things considered bone meal being what bone meal is, I should have known. So the other day, I was about to top dress some cukes and paddy pans with said bone meal and was totally aghast-ed by the stench. I was like, "whatever," as I really wanted to fert my crops. And then when I dug my hand shovel into the meal, I had a total "Lost Boys" moment where the whole five-gallon bucket came alive with maggots. Only, I wasn't vampirically hallucinating, the entire bucket was bone meal, maggots, and wretched. I tried to take a picture, but the little buggers just blend so well with the meal, the jpeg wasn't worth publishing. I ended up dumping the bucket and its contents right into the middle of my compost, thereby making a high phos compost blend that will probably need major leaf dilution before it's safe to use. Who knew?

About two weeks back, the melon patch came in fast and hard just like my metal. Smellin' Melon Mania I was born! In one corner of the ring was the classic, four to seven pound, ultra foo-foo, French Charentais, tasting like the best cantaloupe ever plus rose water with pink-orange juicy-juice flesh. In the other corner was the somewhat scrappy, one to three pound, tag team of the Far North classic American cantaloupe, and its Armenian flashy cousin, the Tigger, looking like a Super Mario Brother's fireball and handsomely displayed in the photo above. The Tigger's aroma was somewhat intoxicating, and I was starting to feel like a bumble bee in my own home with every room smellin' of melons.

Now, this Melon Mania may have sounded like a little slice of heaven, and for the most part it was like a little slice of heaven. But when 20 ripe melons are picked in one day, the refrigeration bottleneck of my business is immediately realized. Subsequently, I learned a new kind of hustle because of my refrigeration problem. I had some knowing and unknowing participants in my quest to de-melon. On the knowing side of things, I give thanks to Rob Burgoyne and Lakewood's LEAF organization, who let me guest-vend on a 12-hour Facebook-notice in front of the Lakewood Library as part of LEAF's CSA program on Wednesday the 18th. And a week prior on the unknowing side of things, I give thanks to Lakewood's Bela Dubby coffee shop, which subsequently allowed me to visually and aromatically entice their customers with my melons, when incidentally I was bringing a Charentais to a friend during Bela's movie night, and when incidentally I had three others just sitting there on my car seat. All in all, I sold four Charentais out of the Subaru that evening.

For the sake of blog publishing, "August Is Insane" will need to continue in the near future.

Alright, I'll write already.

2010-08-03T15:41:00.008-04:00

Borrowing and rephrasing a line from some old Lungfish, alright, I'll write already. I've been busy with non-exciting stuff, like up top there is a picture of my application for Gardening for Greenbacks plus the proprietary edits that my attorney recommended. I finally got that turned into Ifeoma at the City of Cleveland's Economic Development Department. That was like a half year's brainstorming funneled into a necessary yet punishing week of extremely formalized/organized thought and then action. I'm glad it's over with. I just need to hear the yay or nay, and move on from there.

Never thought I'd say this, but I'm starting to feel like Dwight Shrute from the Office. My first major harvest, which is totally separate from rinky-dink single pickings, is beets galore. There's Goldens, Early Wonders, Chioggias, and Crapaudines, which were no good despite the name and being the oldest root beet known in existence. The Chioggias are the Santa Claus-red ones in the picture and are also known as "candy stripe" beets to us common folk. Weird thing was, about every fortieth or fiftieth was completely white, like a slightly muddy ghost beet. And for the most part, these ghost beets tasted like earthened sugar with a mealy texture that would pair well with oatmeal.

Also, pictured up top is Green Urban Enterprises' non-patented Root Crop Rinser, which doubles as the equally non-patented Compost and Soil Sifter, made with every day farm items like 1/4 inch chicken wire, roofin nails, and re-purposed 2 by 4's from Birch's garage. That thing is going to be a lifesaver.

I swapped some fish for mineral fertilizer the other day with Eric Stoffer of Bay Branch Farm, and we got to chatting 'bout our respective farmer's markets, he at Lakewood Farmer's Market, me at Gordon Square's. We got to talking about this and that, and we got onto the dirty subject of reselling.

Reselling. It just makes my skin crawl. Reselling is the act of buying produce from a wholesaler, and then passing it off, and "reselling" it as your own. Reselling is totally different than helping a brother/sister farmer/gardener sell some produce in conjunction with your stand. This latter action is most often fully disclosed to give props to both farmers, is local, and results in real local monetary gain for both participants. Resellers, in contrast, buy bulk produce from California, China, and where ever else, and then sell it to the customer as "their own" or "local." I feel that us, Urban Farmers, need to rally against this practice.

I had some killer marketing ideas present themselves to me today over breakfast in regards to next year's plant start sales. I can't tell you the details because that would break my confidentiality agreement. I'm just saying it's kind of strange when and where inspiration hits. Be ready for it.

Well, it's a day later and I'm just looking to get this blog entry done. Today, I harvested this year's first Far North cantaloupes, five of them. I hope to get them to market on Saturday, but seeing's how cantaloupe is literally my favorite flavor in the world, it's looking doubtful for my customers, especially when my whole kitchen smells of melon for 10 minutes after opening up the fridge. Also, picked my first couple of ears of sweet corn ever today. So, I have the jitters in anticipation of my virginal kernel crunch popping sweetness. In conclusion, I've been thinking about commissioning a cement garden gnome in my likeness.

A Midsummer Night's Farmer's Thoughts

2010-07-22T19:20:00.009-04:00

The last few weeks, I've been kicking back and just watering what will be a late summer's bounty. Nine of the 29 raspberries are showing some signs of sprouts, and six of the seven paw paws seem to be coming along. Being that it's midsummer, I thought I'd do some reflecting on the season so far.

That first picture up there highlights one of my mistakes in garden layout this year. I put the corn in the middle of the plot! Blocking the sprinkler. Shading the other the crops. I had no intentions of even growing corn, but there were so many requests, I had to comply. And with that submission came haste in my design, and hence the corn in the middle.

Even up to a week ago, I was thinking I was done with corn as a crop. But after this week's visit to Marietta, Ohio, where I bought some just picked at three o'clock in the morning, sugary Bicolor Ears; I'm starting to believe it's every Ohio citizens right to picked that day summer corn. I want to see how this year's ears fill in, and if it's halfway good, I will probably continue the pursuit next year.

Cheap soakers hoses are just that, which is mostly to say that they are cheap and aren't worth the hassle. On that note, my whole irrigation "system" needs an overhaul. Sprinklers and spray hoses are okay and definitely do the job. However, straight rows and drip tape will do it better in the future. Now anybody that knows me will tell you my lines/rows/swathes of cool beard zigzags are never straight.

In my personal garden, I have four tomatillo plants. Three are right next to each other and the fourth is about six feet away from the cluster. Now it is a given fact that it takes two tomatillos to tango. That is to say, tomatillo plants are not self-pollinating and it formally takes two separate plants for tomatillo fruits to form. And even though my lonely tomatillo is just six feet away from the other cluster, and my garden is like an epinephrine accident design lab, there are no fruits!

In other layout design news, tomato cultivars will be planted with their own kind to ensure ease of staking/weaving and flush picking next year. That means Amish Paste with the Amish Paste and Caspian Pink with Caspian Pink. The "cool" Monet-inspired color palette of random planting does not outweigh the future convenience of these necessary grow steps.

I'm growing these gnarly blue Hubbard pumpkins that will grow up to 40 pounds and will look like a giant tear drop with warts. In contrast, I'm also growing these cute lil two-pound pumpkins called the Sweet Dumpling. Regardless of size, pumpkins need a ridiculous amount of water and will suck up whatever I give them. One of the Hubbard vines is 16 feet long and seems to grow a half foot a day.

Prepaid customers. I'm looking for a few of them. I'm not talking a full blown CSA by any means. Nor am I talking about a regular "pick-up" schedule. I just need a few folks who can regularly take irregular amounts of produce at irregular intervals just like real life. This would really help me even out my production kinks because some times there's just too little to make a farmer's market worthwhile and too much to eat myself. So, I'll be looking for a few "Prepaids" soon. The means to communicate produce availability may be email, texts, tweets, or facebook announcements, whatever works best for my Prepaids. If you're out there, let me know.

Now that I'm starting to see some production out of my plot, next year's planning is starting to take hold. The number 15 has been resonating in my brain. A few weeks back I heard some SPIN Farmer mention something about 15 bundles of anything being the minimum volume to take to a farmer's market. Conceptually, I thought this was great. Though the SPIN Farmer was referring to sales displays, I feel that 15 could also be applied to number of plants in a planting. Like next year, I will do two plantings of Japanese Long Cucumbers with 15 plants each timed at a 10 day interval. This will give me an abundance of cukes throughout the season for grander displays.

Wow. That was meant to be a quick one and it's two hours later. I got to do this more often. Lastly, I'm not sure how I grew white beets, whether is was a genetic defect or a seed packing mistake, but those two white beets pictured up there tasted like pure sugar. Like, I was thinking they'd be good on oatmeal, for real. Perhaps, these were sugar beets?

Lease is signed

2010-07-09T12:47:00.005-04:00

Back on Wednesday, I anted up on this urban farm thing when I formally signed a lease agreement with the Bellaire Puritas Development Corporation (BPDC), who owns the property next to my Cleveland Land Bank property. I've signed personal leases for apartments, but nothing in the name of a business before. Gratefully, the lease was simple enough that I could understand it without a legal background and with minimal questions.

The last time that I had spoken with BPDC it was over a complaint regarding sunflowers. So I thought the hammer may be coming down at this meeting. Instead, it felt quite the opposite. BPDC assured me that they are still all for the farm and would help block any Buddhist parking lot expansions or other pro-runoff business (or non-profit) entities. Furthermore, BPDC is committed to helping me navigate the perilous waters that are Cleveland fence and shed permitting. I also learned that my farm has inspired some others to start a community garden in the area. The final cherry was when Bryan Gillooly, Executive Director of BPDC, personally bought "A Farm in Cleveland?!" t-shirt to conclude the meeting. Thanks Bryan!

The pictures above are from Thursday, July 8th. The melons completely freaked out in this killer heatwave and almost overtook the black plastic at this point. It's hard to determine where the melons are actually planted. Also, there's a picture of the first farm picking, a jade scallop squash and a Japanese long cucumber that needs some hummus accompaniment.

If you can't tell, the t-shirts are in. However, I've yet to make a formal announcement until I get somebody with better photogenic-ness than myself as a model. I also want to see if any stores around the area will carry them. I have a quasi-appointment at 4 PM today in Coventry at one of the nicest women's clothing boutiques in town. I'll let you know how that goes.

My first farmer's market!

2010-07-06T14:24:00.005-04:00

Took place on July 3rd at the Gordon Square Farmer's Market. I'm so glad it's over with because I had no idea what I was doing. Somehow, I walked away with exactly a dozen dollars for my less than abundant wares. So I feel good about that. Getting over that learning curve seems exponential.

Notice that picture up top, the only reason that I'm partly shaded is because of the good grace and size of Farmer Dan's pop-up tent next to me. It turns out that you need a pop-up tent for both you and your veggies if you're going to sell at farmer's markets. Check.

Because of ATMs, people have an abundance of 20-dollar bills; therefore, I will have ample amounts of one and five dollar bills. Check.

Selling veggies is not for the anti-social. I'm sure glad I like food because people ask questions, a lot of them. Check.

Binder clips are the new duct tape and proletariat-ly work as displays, holders of price tags, the cash stash, holder of table cloths, etc. Subsequently, bring binder clips next time. Check.

Besides these specifics, the learning curve got applied to even mundane tasks like loading up Subee-1 and how people would choose to take their vegetables home. For instance, when people were faced with the option of putting carrots in a plastic sandwich bag or a re-used plastic Chinese carry-out container, people simply opted to dump their carrots in their re-usable bag.

So I'm glad that's all over with! I'm at a post-Spring, early-Summer lull that has me without veggies beyond my own personal consumption. I've got melons, cukes, pumpkins, corn, and tomatoes coming, but sort of nothing right now. I'm busying myself with watering, and paw paw orchard planting. There's some other grants out there that I need to be pursuing wholeheartedly.

In the meantime, some old man complained to me the other day about my sunflowers. Something about he "now needs to inch out when he turns right on red." So I took some pictures of wildflowers for all of you to complain about.

Earlier today, I had a power meeting with Dean Santell and Jim Funai at Tri-C, regarding the development of an urban agriculture program or certificate at Tri-C. It seemed pretty promising, but still in the developmental stages. I'm just glad community colleges are starting to take an interest in our urban farming ventures. For some reason, it makes it seem more real.

Tomorrow, I finally sign a formal lease with the Bellaire-Puritas Development Corp. This has been on the back burner for months, but just never formalized. Hopefully, they don't inundate me with jargon. I don't think that will be the case. I'll keep you updated.

A Florida Weave Ain't a Haircut

2010-06-29T14:48:00.003-04:00

It's a tomato staking/trellising method! I stumbled upon this lifesaver through my bandmate, Jessica, who used to work at Red Basket Farm. She couldn't recall the name of the technique, but gave a good 'nough description that given a little googling it was no problem to find. Eventually, I used the following website and went from there.

www.foogod.com/%7Etorquill/barefoot/weave.html

I'll admit hammering these 35 fence posts taught my right forearm a lesson, hauling around the straw bale for a stool, as these were six foot posts and even with my Chacos I'm still about a half foot short. Hindsight being what it is, next year, I'll do the post installation just after tilling. Besides this learning curve, the Florida Weave rules. I really couldn't imagine caging or staking 100+ tomato plants.

Also in the above photographs, you'll notice that some of that hardwork, me and Kuchna put in several months back with the perennial flower bed is actually paying off. There's a huge assortment of colorful legumes and a couple sunflowers in the photo. As of today, I've got some multi-colored poppies and some white starry asters springing up. When putting in a perennial flower bed for the first time, it's really difficult to discern what is and what is not a flower or weed. So, sometimes you need to let the weeds go a little extra long before you know for sure and pull them.

Ryan Kennedy and I also planted 29 raspberries along a 55 foot hedge two weeks ago. The raspberries were bare-root and have yet to break dormancy. I planted them at twice the suggested spacing. So even if I lose half of them, I'm still good. If you can't tell, I don't trust bare-root plantings.

Lastly, the weirdest thing happened to me on Friday the 25th. As a precursor to this story, I just want to clarify that when you do this urban farm thing, people stop and talk to you, like all the time, seriously. People ask what you're doing, where you selling the vegetables, do you have permission from the city, etc. And then in general, they let you know what you're doing is great.

However, Friday was a little different. I was doing an extreme morning watering, as I was about to visit Rhode Island for the weekend. Then some guy pulls up, and parks illegally on Sprecher, and is yelling something akin to an introduction. It turns out he was introducing himself as a delegate of the SGI Community Center that borders the farm. With the introduction came a booklet-the kind I thought until now that only evangelical Christians gave out to people or left in bathrooms.

Immediately there after, came the requisite, "what ya doing here?" I let him know I was putting in a farm. The reaction was a mocking scoff from this spiritual man, who still hadn't taken the time to even get out of his car. Then the tone got a little insidious, when he asked the next requisite question, "does the city know you're doing this?" Of course, and I let him know that I have a five year lease with the city.

Then his tone changed, like a complete one-eighty to overly friendly (though the dude never got out of the car), as he let me know about SGI. Apparently, they're a Buddhist group. Their spiritual leader has over 100 honorary doctorates. They believe in world peace. They want to change the name of Crossburn Park to their spiritual leader's name. AND THEY WANT MY FARM TO EXPAND THEIR ASPHALT PARKING LOT!

WTF? Really? Really.

Hopefully, SGI respects my lease and that's the end of it. We'll have to see.

Ending on a positive note, I went to Melt the other day and was more than pleased to learn that they had switched take-out containers to a 100% compostable type made from sugarcane fibers. Matt Melt pretty much does everything right, and it's great to see an example of such green leadership.

Farm Hand Profile: Michael W "Birch" Birchler

2010-06-09T12:02:00.009-04:00

I thought I'd try to make this whole blog thing more interesting by stopping a little bit the talking about myself, and instead introducing some of my trusted, weathered farm hands that I've mentioned here or there and along the way. I intend to make this "Farm Hand Profile" into a series.

First up (appearing in chronological order as to when I actually got some physical labor and sweat units out of the them on the farm) is Michael W "Birch" Birchler. Oddly enough, I met Mike 2,200 miles away in coastal Oregon at a another best friend's wedding, whose sister just so happened to live in Lakewood, who Mike eventually married. ?

Mike's hankered down in some really crappy weather throughout this Winter and Spring. There was this time in February when the snow was a foot deep, and we had met up for a beer. Subee-1 was weighted down with several hundred pounds of coffee grinds, and I was griping about needing to get those out of the car. And no sooner had I said "I just need to go dump them on the farm," than we were off at one o'clock in the morning in that foot of snow to the farm in order to christen the grounds with the first of many formerly caffeinated amendments.

Throughout the Spring, we've gone on leaf humus runs. These "runs" tended to correspond to weekdays that we were both off, and it was raining. Our best day, we totaled 18 32-gallon garbage cans of humus. In terms of weather, it was one of the worst: a balmy 58 degrees with either drizzle, fog, rain, storms, or an in between stage. Shoveling humus in the rain is sludgingly heavy and literally brown staining. It gets on everything. And when you finally get in the car, the car immediately fogs up from the aerobic activity of the humus and the dankness of the air. Good times.

Besides these laborious duties, Mike has also contributed with other fun tasks like rock/foundation digging, sulfur spreading, trenching, mowing, and the always risky watering.

As you're starting to see, Birch is quite the asset. His up for anything personality and his zen-like in the moment-ness has allowed the farm to move forward despite the weather and regulatory hurdles. And for that I thank him. In the meantime, I'm trying to get as much sweat and backache as possible out of Mike. 'Cause come August when all those psychedelic tomatoes are coming in and needing picked, Mike is instead going to be busying himself with his very first newborn, which I guess is a fairly valid excuse to not help out on the farm for a while. Now if you ever wanted to help Mike this father-to-be, I know he'd be glad to sell you an iPhone. Just get in touch.

A Networking Week in Review

2010-06-06T10:19:00.007-04:00

It's been a week since the Farm's been in and yet no sprouts of corn, beets, or potatoes. The starts seem to be assimilating nicely, but from what I can tell I'm mostly growing rocks. I swear that every time I water, the rocks multiply and grow in numbers. The next workday will be a "fill-a-five-gallon bucket with rocks day before you are permitted to go home". However, my immediate chore right now is watering, which takes about an hour. After last night's downpour, I have at least one day off.

Apart from the watering, last week was filled with networking, which is something that used to make me completely gag/feel sickened in the realms of corporate business/suits/golf, but has turned into quite a pleasure now that I'm dealing with grassroot non-profits, other non-profits, entrepreneurs, foodies, and farmers.

On Tuesday the 1st, Frank Skala invited me to give a 15-minute urban farm presentation at the monthly Friends of Euclid Creek (FOEC) meeting. FOEC is a watershed group trying to revitalize Euclid Creek. As a watershed group, FOEC supports things like dam deconstruction/rebouldering, rainbarrel workshops, bioswales, and rain gardens. However, FOEC also supports a much more generalized environmental view, and hence my invitation. The presentation went great and generated applause from the 25 or so people in attendance. They seemed to get a real kick out of "Old Husher" and my speech segues were smooth.

Wednesday was a power day, starting early at Cleveland State University, where I met graduate student, Keith Peppers. He sat down with me all formal-like in a music sound room complete with a drumkit and that soundproofing stuff on the walls. There was a table in the middle of the room, adorned with a huge microphone and a Marantz digital recorder and two chairs on opposite sides. And in this weirdly sterile, soundproof environment, I gave my oral history in the form of a question and answer regarding my choice to become an urban farmer with Mr. Peppers.

Immediately afterward, I went right down the street to what is probably the coolest screen printer in the U.S.A, Jakprints, to do some market research on women's t-shirt cuts. During my visit, I also learned that if I bring in five pounds of recycled paper, then I'll get 10% of my order, which is alotta mullah when you have eight screens.

In the early evening, I caught up with Jim Doughman for some beers of JumpStart Inc, which is a non-profit Northeast Ohio technology investment firm. He wanted to talk just to see if he could possibly assist in any way. Pretty early in our discussions, he came up with a couple potential funding opportunities and list of several individuals. By the end of our pitcher of Moondog ESB, Dan Young (mobile-app guru of DXY Solutions) was chatting with us about mobile-apps that could assist in picking orders.

Wednesday ended at Lakewood's Bela Dubby coffee house. Wednesday night is "Noise Night" at Bela Dubby and is quite the draw (to my surprise). Both, my friend, Chris Wood, and artist-buddy, Steve Kuchna were going up there. So I had no choice. Chris wanted to buy tomato plants, and Steve had art for me.

Saturday was another good day. It rained a boatload, thus reducing my workload. When I got to the Farm that day, my nice rake was laying there right next to the plot. Apparently, Mike and I had forgotten it the day before; and obviously, no one had stolen it either. For as many warnings as I have gotten from the multitudes of various resources, the rake should have been stolen in theory. How's that for creating vibrations?

Furthermore, it was Little League Marching Day down the street. Eventually, these little kids all marched up Sprecher in their various, green, orange, red, or blue uniforms past the Farm. I was watering while this was happening, and then all of sudden, I had a man making a beeline directly to me. I should have recognized him, but in his civilian uniform of shorts, baseball hat, and sunglasses, I had no clue. It turns out it was Cleveland City Council President, Sweeney! After quick introductions, he gave me a verbal pat-on-the-back, and I returned it with a business card, and he proceeded with the March.

Today, Kuchna and I will be making the last tweaking of the "A Farm in Cleveland?!" t-shirt artwork. Ordering will commence!

Amended, Trenched, Fenced, and Planted: Plot on!

2010-06-01T11:57:00.007-04:00

It was a pretty intense Memorial Day weekend. I felt like it needed to be an ante-up, all-in kind of weekend, no more dilly-dallying. My 100+ heirloom tomatoes needed a place to go. I don't think I could have picked a worse weekend in terms of weather 85 degrees, overly sunny, and dankly humid. My hair didn't dry all weekend, even after showering, and it didn't seem like I could drink enough water.

So the general plan for the weekend was trench on Friday, fence on Saturday, and plant on Sunday. The whole process ended up extending one extra day into Monday. I woke up early on Friday and secured my afternoon rental of the Ditch Witch from Alternative Rental and Service. The Ditch Witch is a terrifyingly looking machine with a two-foot long chainsaw-like blade. The blade is attached to another contraption, which allows it roll. The whole purpose is to cut a two-foot deep trench so that the fencing can be buried in order to keep out the four and two legged critters. My main concern being the groundhogs.

Mike "The Foreman" Birchler helped on Friday, which without his input, none of this would have gotten done. There were times when the Ditch Witch cut like room temperature butter, and you could literally daydream of all the future produce. And then there was the other 80% of the time, when we were cutting out part of the buried asphalt driveway, or hitting large metal pipes, or clogging the blade with bricks, or getting stuck in the dirt. There were some places that I just had to compromise and go less than the ideal two feet deep. Hopefully, groundhogs can't burrow through rock. I performed most of the trenching, but Birchler kept my lines straight, dug up the nuisance rocks/bricks/pipes, hauled the kicked up rocks/bricks/pipes, and was a good general support when I was hurling f-bombs at the Ditch Witch. I think we both got a few more hairs on our chest that day.

Saturday, the work posse started late (work posse being defined here as me and Brandon Scullion). The sun was out in full force, helping to re-burn Friday's sunburn. The task at hand was to put up the critter fence. 25 fence posts and four 50-foot lengths of fence. We thought no problem. Mike and I did all the hard stuff the day earlier. Or so we thought...

It turned out that everything about the fencing besides driving the posts was difficult. One of the least joyful tasks was latching the fence to the posts in the trench. Basically, you had to lay on your chest in the piercing-sharp rocks and dirt, while plunging your hands into the trench, hoping to see what you were doing. Then there were the edges of the fence that seemed engineered to cut flesh. I'm just glad Brandon and I are up to date on our tetanus shots. The last fencing chore was to simply backfill the dirt back into the trench. It hadn't rained overnight or anything, but that dirt settled, and what was allotted an hour for backfilling ended up taking us three more sweat-soaked hours.

Sunday was the fun day with a bigger group of volunteers than ever, including mainstay, Brandon, my old lady, Sarah, her yoga partner, also named Sarah, and Cosmic Marijana (who is a real person/artist, and not a pot reference). Ryan Kennedy came through for me again with another couple bails of straw, which were slated for Scandinavian-styled potato growing. Sunday, we managed to plant 10 pounds of yukon golds, 112 tomato plants, a handful of cukes and small squashes, and thirteen melons.

The tomatoes were laid out in seven rows of sixteen tomato plants. The first three rows comprised of four cultivars (Principe Borghese, Amish Paste, Jersey Giant, and Japanese Black Trifele) in an orderly fashion. For the next four rows, order was thrown out the window, and the 20+ cultivars were planted randomly. I guarantee I will have the most psychedelic tomato patch in all of Cleveland with reds, purples, yellows, whites, and stripes. August looks to look amazing. The melons were put on 4-mil black plastic to absorb as much heat as possible. I can't wait to see how they prosper in the full sun of Old Husher's Farm.

On Monday, Brandon and I finished the plantings with four rows of corn, a row of onion and basil, blue pumpkins, and beets galore. Now we just had to name the plot itself for the sake of reference. My crew and I threw around a lot of names; some of them were generic like Plot A; others were whimsical; but eventually I settled with the obvious no-brainer, "the Old Plot." The Old Plot being the first is subsequently the oldest (duh). That evening I treated the crew to a seven pound pulled pork shoulder on the grill. I went all out for them, and besides the shoulder I grilled a cabbage stuffed with bacon and bbq sauce. There were three homemade bbq sauces on hand (North Carolina vinegar, South Carolina mustard vinegar, and classic bbq), as well as some Texas Pete's if people needed some kick. Thanks yall.

As for the soil amendments, I just want to state for the record in digital print (so that I can personally forget) the amending. We added 28 32-gallon garbage cans of leaf humus, an approximate literal ton of coffee grinds from Loop, 46 pounds of sulfur to drop the pH to a slightly acidic level, and 35 pounds of rock phosphate. I'm avoiding green sand, lime, and ash because my potassium levels are extremely high.

Looking ahead into the near future, I intend to plant my raspberry patch and paw paw orchard within the next week. Subsequent major watering will follow. And then onto new plot development.

Lessons Learned

2010-05-23T10:00:00.009-04:00

A lesson to me is when you know something is definitive-ly a fact, but for whatever reason you don't accept it as a law of truth. The lesson part comes as an example in real life as why that something, whatever it is, is a truth.

On Tuesday, June 18th, I learned a couple of important lessons on my inaugural visit to Cleveland's hippest farmer's market: the Tremont Farmer's Market. It was a crummy day in terms of weather, but the market itself was still well-attended. There were several producers on hand that day, a few folks selling plants, lots of bakers, live music, a blade sharpener, and a cooking demonstration. I learned my lessons from Ricardo Sandoval, the cooking demonstrator, and George Remington, a fellow OSU Extension Market Gardener Training Program Graduate, who was selling his plants.

Ricardo Sandoval is a mover and a shaker in terms of Cleveland restaurateurs, owning upscale places like Fat Cat's and Felice's, as well as my favorite martini bar, the Lava Lounge. He's also firmly dedicated to buying as much food as locally as possible, even having an urban garden and water barrels at his Fat Cat's. Ricardo taught me my second lesson that day, which is listed here first because of importance.

That lesson is one that any salesperson, anywhere, selling anything, could have told me and has told me, and my dad when he reads this is going to be rolling his eyes back into his head, and that lesson is MAKE THE SALE!

Earlier that day, I had harvested a five gallon bucket's worth of bok choy and needed an outlet other than my friends to unload some. Now mind you, Mr. Sandoval had said at a lecture that I attended that he sometimes buys at the Tremont Farmer's Market. So, I thought I'd put these two concepts together and try and sell my bok choys to Mr. Sandoval, if he just happened to be there.

When I got to Tremont, I walked north along W 14th on the sidewalk into the Market. About half the vendors were located along W 14th on that strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk. After my notherly jaunt, the market makes a half circle that could be described as southeast or counterclockwise depending on your way of thinking.

One of the last farmers in the northerly row, a farmer named Floyd of Red Basket Farm, was the only the only vendor with a hint of bok choy and that came in the form of taken-down signage. When asked about the sign, Floyd advised me that he was all sold out of bok choy that day, which made me feel like I wasn't stepping on any official vendors' of the Tremont Farmer's Market toes, if I were to see Ricardo Sandoval and if he wanted to buy my bok choys.

As I arced around counterclockwise at about 4'o'clock, Ricardo Sandoval was just breaking down his cooking demonstration. After introductions and some curious small talk that included a gift to me of my first green garlic, I mustered the courage to see if he would like to see, if not, buy some of my bok choys. Somewhat amazingly and surprisingly, Ricardo was receptive, just not at the Tremont Farmer's Market, which I naively/negligently didn't even consider in my scheme of things.

And here is where the lesson was learned. Ricardo wanted to meet me back at the restaurant in 2o minutes. But I already had a group of friends waiting for me at Taco Tuesday (I know this is totally all my bad). So I countered with how about in an hour and a half? In which, Ricardo reluctantly accepted.

Making a very long story finally short, and after my full belly of tacos and Mexican beers, and friendly chit chat, I proceeded with my five gallons of bok choy over to the restaurant, where of course, Ricardo was nowhere to be found, and I, of course, lost the sale.

The lesson learned here is when in the process of making the sale, hold on to that sale by all means, until that sale has been done sold. Me having Taco Tuesday plans and countering 20 minutes with an hour and half was just stupid. In the end I left some bok choy samples, but I was still left with about three gallons worth, which eventually made it to my friends.

Now the second lesson is less dramatic, and it comes by way of George Remington and (I think) his Morningside Farm. To put it bluntly, George has the best, biggest, baddest tomato plants around at ridiculously affordable prices. These things were three foot tall with monster stalks. He had about 20 cultivars, and the purple were mostly sold out.

A few weeks back this lesson had been alluded to when Subee-1 saved my plants when it acted like a greenhouse for a week. Now, George had perfect examples of what can be done early in Northeast Ohio to tomatoes with a greenhouse. Needless to say, it was impressive; and needless to say, the lesson learned is that I need a greenhouse or similar structure, preferably, a mobile one. Now, George did you do any supplemental heating?

The picture above is of another haul of bok choys, demostrating three different sizes, including some ultra-minis, which really couldn't stand the onslaught of slugs and extreme wind/rain and won't be grown again. The other picture is of my garden a few weeks ago; however, it doesn't look like that as of now. Over and out.

Rollercoaster of Regulations and Subsequent Emotions

2010-05-16T12:03:00.003-04:00

It's been a while and I apologize for the delay. I assure you I'm still here. But sometimes it ain't easy being a pioneer. And that's what us, Re-Imagining Grantees, are. Pioneers. You see, the Federal government gives cities money all the time for the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. And from what I can tell, cities do things like deconstructing abandoned houses and creating parks with that money. Cleveland, however, is trying something wholly unique with the Re-Imagining program in that Cleveland is actually funneling money directly to its citizens (and it neighbor's citizens, like me) for the people to do their own projects. This is a very grassroots approach. And when I write "wholly unique," I mean no city in the United States has ever given this kind of Federal money directly to the people before. Hindsight being 20/20, we all should have known their were going to be some snags to work through.

You can see a picture of one such snag above. On Wednesday, I went around my farm's neighborhood, taking pictures of houses with chain-link frontages and collecting their addresses. The city wanted a total of six residential frontages to verify that chain-link is normal for the area. Lucky for me, this is Cleveland, and chain-link is everywhere. So this task only took about an hour. Other snags have included water access, zoning laws in regards to permanent improvements on Land Bank land, soil lead levels, etc. Somehow and lucky for me, my soil's lead levels are low. Otherwise, I'd have to create giant raised beds on the entire property. You see, the danger of lead is not from growing veggies in it, but rather from when it becomes airborne like when you're tilling or plowing.

Please understand, I call these examples "snags." But really, they're just real-life laws and regulations that need to be worked through and sometimes formally changed. So that's why and how us, Re-Imagining Grantees, are pioneers. As I am not an anarchist, I accept these cogs in my narrowly-focused-Western wheel. I am not complaining, just stating the facts. That was the reason for the long delay in writing, I didn't want to be reactionary and complain.

In the meantime, I've been harvesting bok choys left and right in my personal garden. Today, I just harvested three different bok choys: extra dwarf, mini, and mid size. Easy and fast, I love bok choy (as do snails, hence the holes). "Real food doesn't always look perfect" should be some kind of mantra.

I've also been out morel hunting. Being in the woods always clears my head, and finding morels pretty much makes me ecstatic. If you can't tell by the picture, Sarah and I were successful in our hunt. We made a Buffalo Morel Stroganoff that looked completely disgusting, but tasted amazing.

Subee-1's transformation into a U.A.V. (Urban Agriculture Vehicle) is nearing complete. Back on the 11th, me and my buddy Mike hauled 16 32-gallon trash cans of leaf humus over to the farm. Also, during the last week of hellacious thunder and wind, I learned Subee-1 doubles as a pretty awesome makeshift greenhouse with the storage capacity of roughly 400 plants. Giving credit its due, my dad used to use my Plymouth Colt like this in high school. The extra warmth and muted light seems perfect for plants.

Going forward, I want to be writing a lot more, perhaps even creating a regular writing schedule. I also may be revamping this blog, or starting a new more graduated version of the blog soon. I'll probably be choosing the latter option. Anyways, over and out. I got trellises to build.

Happy Birthday to Me and Tidbits

2010-04-18T09:45:00.004-04:00

The last week and a half has been filled with tidbit types of work, nothing overly transforming in terms of property renewal. So this blog will probably go forward like a train of thought as I look at the calendar with its scrappy Sharpie-ed in reminders.

After the speaking event, there were about two or three days of correspondence coupled with some medium-core seeding and transplanting work. I built a raised bed for carrots at the house. The damn carrots still haven't sprouted yet and likely won't as they were treated to a good hot house solar oven baking when it got really sunny on the 10th and I didn't remove the glass until several hours later. At that point, there were literally voluminous amounts of steam coming off the soil when the glass was lifted. I've heard of mushroom farmers in Africa pasteurizing straw in a similar way.

On Saturday the 10th, I went to a workshop at Cleveland State that instructed us, Re-Imagining Cleveland grantees, on the reimaginingcleveland.org website. I found a level of comfort when I learned that everybody's project is moving slowly, maybe even more so than mine. However later that day, I found a great level of discomfort when I went over to Ryan Kennedy's Crop Mob at his Turning Point Farm on Barber. This dude is getting more done without grant money than the rest of us are getting done with. Hot dogs, snakes, trash, extreme sulfurous odors, big rocks, little rocks, fire, good times.

On Tuesday the 12th, me and about 20 others graduated from the OSU Extension Office's Market Gardener Training Program, but not before we passed a 300 question scantron exam. The picture above is our serious administrator/teacher, Morgan Taggart. To make matters worse, I forgot my pencil! The class itself felt like a true meeting of minds with so many future forward pro-Cleveland farmers. That Lynn Rodemann is doing amazing things at the Pear Street spot, I can't wait 'til she gets her Devil's Backbone Garden up and running (which can be subsequently said for my Old Husher's Farm). Us, OSU Market Gardener Training Program Alumni, need to stay in touch.

Tax day is technically my birthday. So a giant happy birthday to me. I'm actually excited about this one.

And on the 16th, me and my buddy, Mike, shoveled, hauled, carried, and spread a dozen 32 gallon trash cans of leaf humus onto the farm. You can see the birth of rows, as well as why Subarus completely and totally rule, holding two dudes and six Rubbermaid Brute trash cans full of humus. At 158,000 miles, Subee-1 seems to be going strong. The interior is completely beat/gross, but its soul is still there and purring. Old Husher's Farm will probably be the eventual cause of death for Subee-1, but at this point I'm still amazed at how well it has held up to my abuse.

A Mighty Totonka Thanks for Last Night!

2010-04-06T11:13:00.009-04:00

Last night was the first public forum for the Re-Imagining Cleveland program, and I was asked to give a five minute presentation on Old Husher's Farm! The event was held in the Great Lakes Brewing Company Tasting Room and put on by E4S and Local Food Cleveland. The place was packed with 250 attendees, making the room a little warm in a good way even in a short-sleeve. The energy felt like a Sedona-vortex with everybody riding the same wave of fervored excitement.

Peter McDermott emceed. Lilah Zautner from Neighborhood Progress briefed the crowd on the whole Re-Imagining Cleveland program. Morgan Taggart from OSU Extension explained the unique hurdles us farmers are currently facing in terms of zoning, fences, sheds, etc. and what Cleveland is and will be doing about these hurdles. Ifeoma Ezepue talked about the amazing only-in-Cleveland grant program called Gardening for Greenbacks. My peers, Barb Strauss, Mansfield Frazier, Virginia Houston, and Jamel Humphrey also presented their projects. Mansfield, let me tell you, I'm looking forward to a bottle of your wine in a few years.

At any rate, I had a total blast and met so many kind people wanting to help me and Cleveland Urban Ag in so many ways. A mighty totonka thanks to everybody in attendance and those who wanted to attend. And a special mighty totonka thanks to these individuals:

To Peter McDermott, who invited me to present last night, who literally created Local Food Cleveland and is generally like Voltron's head guiding this nebulous grassroots food movement in Cleveland.

To Bobbi Reichtell for buying me a beer, being the guidling light behind Neighborhood Progress and Re-Imagining Cleveland, and for initially helping me navigate through ohiogreenprint.org.

To Angela Shuckahosee, who I had the pleasure of meeting last night, who helped me get the thumb of approval from Councilman, Martin J. Sweeney's office so many months back, and who is still willing to help.

To Brad Deane from Senator Sherrod Brown's Cleveland office for making it out last night and offering his hands to get dirty on Old Husher's Farm. Brad's immediate re-iteration of this point via a personal email this morning has made my day.

To Councilman Joe Cimperman for being in attendance and just keeping his ear to the floor of what's going on in Cleveland.

To Jared Earley from Whole Foods Market. The fact that a giant corporation cares enough to come out and listen to what these micro-scaled farm projects are all about is really encouraging. Thank you again for potentially wanting to help with Farm Aid and sales outlets. I will be in touch.

To Carl Skalak, who is the weather-hardened trailblazer of the Cleveland Farm scene with his Blue Pike Farm. I appreciate the offer for drip irrigation help.

To Hank Habermann and his offer of a small supply of paw paw trees and the opportunity to help teach a mushroom growing seminar for the Green Triangle Project.

To Eric and Annabel Stoffer of Bay Branch Farm, who have been just good social people.

To Ryan Kennedy, whose infectious positive energy is something to be felt. I look forward to bouncing ideas off of him in the future.

To Molly Vaughn and Vikki Horowitz for wanting to help with Farm Aid.

To E4S and Local Food Cleveland for having me and providing these networking opportunities.

To Neighborhood Progress, Great Lakes Brewing Company, and Ohio City Pasta for sponsoring these events and in helping anchor the Cleveland Food Scene. I'm having the last of last year's homegrown and made spaghetti sauce on three bundles of Ohio City Pasta's linguini for dinner later tonight. Yum.

Seedlings, Speaking, and Speaking of Seedlings

2010-04-02T10:33:00.004-04:00

About a week ago, I had some friends over to jam some music of the generally very-loud rock variety. Coincidentally, this jam session coincided with the first emergence of the sproutlings from the first set of soilblocks. Everybody was checking out the sproutlings and somehow our conversations migrated to the whacked out and glorious scientific research of the 1970's, where researchers would subject plants to classical music or grating noise/heavy metal to see which plants would grow best. Of course, the classical music plants always grew best. Awww, the 70's.

Ultimately, we subjected my sproutlings to a similar test that evening. And ultimately, the sproutlings died because of heavy metal. Whoops. It turns out extreme low-end frequencies like those created by bass and keyboards will physically shake the soilblocks off their perch, and those soil tests and sproutlings ended up like Humpty Dumpty.

As a result, I ended up moving the seedling space from the jam room to the neighboring storage room in my basement. There's a picture of the new incubating space. Emergence has been pretty good except for some dryspots and me covering seeds that are not supposed to be covered when sprouting.

Me and my buddy, Mike went out to the farm for the first time this Spring on Wednesday. We covered a 300 square foot area with a literal ton of coffee grinds from Loop Coffeehouse and did a real cursory till. It smelled so good! My sandled feet and bare hands were stained brown. Also of note, I got my first redneck of the 2010 season. Now I just gotta cut the sleeves from my old heavy metal t-shirts for the whole package. In addition, we picked up three loads of trash while we were there, re-using the coffee grind bags. If you can't tell, my car's a total mess.

TOTALLY EXCITING NEWS! I have my first speaking engagement since this whole undertaking. It's on April 5th at Great Lakes Brewing Company. Entrepreneurs for Sustainability and Local Food Cleveland are co-sponsoring the event. It's meant to be a showcase of the Re-Imagining Cleveland project. I encourage everyone to go. You will need to RSVP at any of the sponsors' websites.

In Generalness: Week of 03/14/2010

2010-03-19T17:47:00.005-04:00

The last week has been an awesome official end to Winter 2010. It's felt like Spring, hitting the 60's. Some krokuses are up next to the house. I've turned compost piles. I've checked my farm for wet spots. None found. Yay! I also did some gnarly weeding in my blueberry patch, a voracious running beast with clover like leaves. Yuck!

Over the weekend, I drove out to Slavic Village to a Small Fruits Workshop, presented by Joe Kovach and the OSU Extension. Raspberries, blueberries, strawberries and apples, plus a lasagna-style vegetable garden. The Cleveland Botanical Garden maintains the plot, and the neighbors look after it. I'm ordering 40 strawberry plants as a direct inspiration from this workshop.

My company, Green Urban Enterprises LLC, formally exists! The business cards are made and totally sweet! The design incorporates the "A Farm in Cleveland?!" logo, plus relevant contact info, plus a map. An artist friend, Stephe DK, did the artwork and layout, and I'd say we split the design duties; however, he might tell you otherwise.

In my opinion after reading all these organic ag books through the winter, the number two take home message after hoophouses is soil blockers. There's a few pictures above. Supposedly, in Euro nurseries throughout Europe, plants are sold as starts without containers in these soil blocks, entirely removing the need for plastic containers and the subsequent corner of the basement that they inevitably take up. Sounds like a dream come true to me.

So a couple of weeks back, I went on the world wide web and found me some soil blockers. This task was a little difficult because a lot places were sold out already "due to unprecedented demand." When the soil blockers came in the mail, I was immediately struck by their branding, stating "Made In England." Like how cool is that? When's the last time you bought ANYTHING from England besides tea, or maybe some ale, or one of those little cars?

Also, I just met today with the good peeps at the Beachland Ballroom to discuss the 1st Annual Cleveland Farm Aid Benefit show. It looks like it's gonna happen on a Sunday night most likely in May. Now I just need more bands, and perhaps some restaurant and CDC sponsors. The basic concept is that bands would represent either a community garden, for-profit market garden, or a farmer's market. The band would have an individual in one of these agricultural endeavors. Proceeds would go to a specific project at that particular community garden, market garden, or farmer's market. I plan to use Willie Nelson-inspired imagery for the flyer.

This Sunday, March 21st, it's Seedling Sunday at Casa de Hush.

Book Review #4: Mushroom Cultivator: A Practical Guide to Growing Mushrooms at Home by Paul Stamets and J. S. Chilton

2010-03-14T11:59:00.002-04:00

It's been exactly a dozen years since I've first read Mushroom Cultivator. At the time, I was finishing my Botany degree at Miami. I was immersed in plant cell tissue culture,taking a scanning electron microscopy course, doing a little help at a Cinci shiitake farm, hunting morels in the spingtime, and reading other mushroom texts.

With all that being said, Mushroom Cultivator is not the masterpiece that I remember from my days of old. The terms "practical" and "home" don't actually seem to apply. The writing and general presentation of the book is choppy-choppy. This may be the result of two authors. Then, there's all the scientific jargon and the always reader popular latin names. Don't get me wrong, Mushroom Cultivator is full of awesome information and is an encyclopedia of growth parameters; however, it feels like a trip to the dentist office, extraction is just painful.

I know home is where the heart is; however for the purposes of literature, "home" needs to be defined to determine if this book may be "practical" to you. One defining question could be, in your town/village/city/hamlet/countryside oasis/suburb/farm, could you have a five foot tall by four foot deep and wide horse manure compost pile? If so, this book may be "practical" to you.

I use the compost pile as an example because after an exhaustive 30 page discourse on the details of hot composting a one ton pile of horse manure straw bedding, the authors switch gears to non-composted substrates. Immediately, the non-composted substrates seem more practical to the home grower and include simpler materials like straw and woodchips. However, this section is breezed through, which basically left the door open for Mr. Stamets next book (a classic marketing technique). And of course, I own the next book and will review it in a few months.

By the way, this author, here and now, being Justin Husher, wants to say that as much as I find Mushroom Cultivator frustrating, I find his next, next book, or maybe even his next, next, next book, Mycelium Running to be worthy of a Nobel prize. I, hereby, nominate Mr. Stamets for a Nobel. So, none of this criticism is meant as a knock against what-will-be-truly re/evolutionary work that Mr. Stamets has pioneered. It's a criticism of format and presentation.

Mushroom Cultivator is a bit difficult to digest. However, it is packed full of information. With a little teeth pulling, you could filter through your personally relevant parts. I think this book could almost be classified as a historical document. And thus should be on your shelf, at least as reference. If you're a total beginner in mushroom cultivation, then COMPLETELY skip the 100 pages of mushroom contamination because then you'll never be motivated to start. And starting is what it's all about.

At this point, it seems rather clear that the door is wide open for these mushroom hort techniques to be applied in the urban setting.

"In the 1,000's of Feet"

2010-03-04T21:45:00.004-05:00

As we're all about to witness the explosion of the urban food movement, I see the syntax and language morphing over time. Specifically, where I see change is in the concepts of acres. In general, most of us in urban foods have 1,000's of square feet, which is not quite the plural "acres" we always read about in even the most liberal of farm/ag/organic literature. My farm has 17,000 square feet, and it seems huge! My personal property is 0.09 acres, and I am considered to have a decent yard. Because of this, I think most city folk have no real concept of what an acre is or even looks like. I believe that my 17,000 could easily pass as an acre to most city folk though it's only a little more than a third.

As the explosion keeps blowing up, the urban ag info highway will evolve with it. Books. Youtubes. Webisodes. And what-nots. We will be speaking in the language of 1,000's of square feet like, "how many thousand square feet ya got," or,"I yielded so many pounds of tomatoes in two thousand feet." Don't get me wrong, I understand that there are acres available in our Rust Belt environs; however, an acre will not be the norm for the urban gardener. So let's keep good notes and even better Excel spreadsheets, and see what we can do with our thousands.

E4S EVENT: Meet the Superstar Farmers of Northeast Ohio.

2010-03-02T10:26:00.011-05:00

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending one of Cleveland's many local food events. However, this event felt like an ultra power-packed evening with several hundred people in attendance, including members of the press (myself excluded from that statement). Everybody was in attendance to celebrate the best of best and longest Northeast Ohio food producers.

The major players of Cleveland's Green Scene organized this occasion. Entrepreneurs for Sustainability and Local Food Cleveland (an awesome social-networking site for everything food and local and in Cleveland) put together the event, while Great Lakes Brewing Company hosted. The event being "Meeting the Superstar Farmers of Northeast Ohio," turned out to be an introduction to eight separate farmers with mostly different wares and experiences, coming from as close as within the city of Cleveland (Blue Pike Farm), or as far as about 60 miles out from Cleveland.

I will basically report who or what stood out from the information smorgasbord. One thing I noticed in terms of standing out is that it is highly correlated with having product samples, though as you will see through examples coming up not perfectly correlated.

That being said, Abbe Turner and her Lucky Penny Farm, whose whimsical business card states "CEO, Cheesemaker, Entrepreneur, Optimist," really stood out. Obviously, Ms. Turner is all about the cheesemaking. With her own crew of goats, she makes a feta and a classic, scrumptious soft goat cheese. Her presentation was simple with ice cream-styled sample spoons made for dipping right into the cheeses, no cracker to adulterate the product.

Ms. Turner can now also substitute "cheesemaker" on her business card to "caramelmaker." Her goat milk caramel can be described in modern terms as "OMG!" OMG is right. This caramel was like none other, never have I had a caramel richer and smoother in texture with a color like some kind of gold-radiating, light mocha. The caramel was perfectly amorphous and runny, but thick enough that one twirl of the spoon was enough to contain the glob of wholesome goodness. I want to go out and help on Lucky Penny Farm.

Miller Livestock Company, Inc. also really stood out due to their subversive marketing ploy of sampling their grass-fed and pastured tri-tip. I've all but given up beef because of the lack of options like Miller Livestock. I like their grassroots selling style. Basically, their customers buy direct in some form or another.

Jeff Brunty and his Brunty Farms stood out just for sheer enthusiasm and what seemed like amazingly youthful energy. I'm not sure how old Mr. Brunty is, but his age seemed generations apart from the other Superstars. However, his wisdom did not follow this age gap. Chickens and turkeys are his specialty, but Brunty may be making the jump to beef or pork soon. Farming on 17 acres in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park with his girlfriend, Brunty is part of the new school and is totally refreshing. I'd feel comfortable calling him "dude," especially since he forgot, like, all of his business cards. He left me with this sage-like advice, "you can just google Brunty Farm." El dude-a-rino, for sure.

Carl Skalak and his Blue Pike Farm left an impression not because of delicious samples, but rather because of Mr. Skalak's presentation style that seemed to chide and mock the event. He sometimes brought the crowd to an uncomfortable laugh (myself included). Perhaps, he's the Andrew Dice Clay of Cleveland Urban Farming. Aesthetically, I like his concepts, especially regarding open pollinated heirlooms, but his 500 acre-soy-farmer-about-to-lose-the-farm vibe sort of trumped his aesthetics to me personally. Does anybody know where to get this Polish Cleveland tomato that he was talking about? Or the name?

Lastly, a general theme of the event kept echoing throughout the night. That theme being, do the urban/small/micro farm thing only if you generally love the work and lifestyle, as it is not a get rich quick scheme, or even a guarantor of wealth.

Sorry no pictures this time, but you can eventually check out the whole event here:

www.localfoodcleveland.org

Otherwise, you can probably just google any of the names, organizations, or companies mentioned in the article. Go Cavs!

Book Review #3: The New Organic Grower: A Master's Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener by Eliot Coleman

2010-02-23T08:43:00.003-05:00

Whoa! I just devoured the second text from my Market Gardener Training Class, and all I can say about Eliot Coleman's "The New Organic Grower" is that it is intense. This book isn't for the amateur or novice who wants to throw a couple of tomatoes and peas in the ground and just go with it. The words "Master's Manual" in the extended title let the reader know what they will be getting into with this book.

Intense? Yes, intense. Coleman describes in great detail eight year crop rotations with corresponding green cover rotations, and the mechanics and how-tos of making a mobile greenhouse including history and the winter sun's angle; And just when you think it's all jargon just like the last sentence, Coleman brings it back down to Earth with awesomely effective hand illustrations. Being that crop rotations are a place where I completely lack experience, I intend to initially rip off Coleman's model these upcoming years.

I also like the attention given to rock minerals, clay minerals, and the wide-world of animal manures. I've been curious about soil blocking over the last month, but Coleman sold me. Soil blocking is a must. The winter gardening section is amazing, but apparently not amazing enough to keep Coleman from writing an entire winter gardening book. Again, most of this information will be beyond the average backyard organic gardener, but is perfect for someone who is about to go into market production (like me).

DEFINITION: COMMUNITY-SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE, very commonly known as just CSA. The following definition is in my own words.

A CSA is a form of farming, where a group of people prepay a farmer for his goods throughout an entire growing season. The group could be tiny (say two or three) or very large in size (say 300). The farmer may actually be a single farmer or a group of farmers. The growing season is normally defined by a number of weeks, like 10, 12, or 16 weeks. Often, members of the group will do some kind of community service-like work at "their" farm (say weeding or picking blueberries). Individual CSAs are unique and may contain other variables like home delivery or centralized pick-up; some include meat, dairy, eggs; others are veggie only; sometimes members pick their own vegetables. So, the variety of CSAs is endless.

The basic benefit of the CSA to the farmer is that it allows the farmer to focus his energy on the farm during peak production periods, instead of sales outlets during that same period. The prepayment of cash isn't a bad thing for the farmer.

The basic benefit of the CSA to the customer is the customer knows where their food is coming from and generally how the food was produced. Other benefits to the customer can include reduced time food shopping (what's called an opportunity cost by economists) and the "allure" of spending a day or two helping out on "their" farm.

I bring up CSAs in this book review because Coleman seems to have a straight-up beef with the term. He prefers his own term, "Food Guild," or, "Organic Food Club," or the generalist concepts of "subscription marketing," or worse yet, "producer-consumer copartnerships." His tone during these two pages of the book feels bitter to me as a reader, like he missed the hippie-boat in the late 60's on CSAs and didn't hear about them until the 80's (at which point Coleman was already an organic guru).

To Coleman's credit, this book is 15 years old. Maybe in 1995, CSA was not such a ubiquitous term yet. However in 2010 here in Cleveland, we have five or six CSAs already, including a web-based one. The term CSA is here to stay. The bitterness that Coleman exudes towards the term CSA gave the book a weird vibe, enough for me to write about it. Maybe, I'm just sensitive.

Bottom line:

Buy this book if you want to, are thinking about, or already involved in small organic market garden/farm production for money. Buy this book if you are a freak with expansive curiosities specific to hardcore organic gardening. A software engineer with about 200 square feet of space, an automatic watering system (self-installed, of course), a composting system comprising of a red wigglers AND a classic pile, may be an example of such a freak.

Don't buy this book if you are just getting into organic gardening. Wait a couple of years on this one. There are plenty better introductory books on the subject. Don't buy this book if you're overwhelmed by detail. I think most people can fit themselves into one of those four statements.

Otherwise, I've been out there. In Cleveland. Networking. Kissing hands. Shaking babies. On Saturday the 20th, I went to a fruit tree pruning seminar at the beautiful Dunham Tavern Museum, courtesy of the OSU Extension office. I met a fellow paw paw head by the name of Josh Klein who organizes the Gordon Square Farmers Market with reasonable overhead for us urban farmers. And then through entirely unique circumstances via disk golf and then rock n roll, I met another Clevelander with access to autoclaves, agar cultures, and laminar flowhoods (those are the capital ingredients for a mushroom farm enterprise). Needless to say, I'm stoked. Tonight, sweet potato donuts for my fellow market gardener trainees.

Soil Tests in the Snow

2010-02-12T09:31:00.005-05:00

You know you're a Cleveland farmer when...

Despite the 20 degrees, the half foot of snow, the kite-famous wind from the lake, and the current blustery conditions, you put your best soil probe forward and plunge deep into the frosted urban tundra. That's just what I did on Tuesday afternoon, and now you may wonder just what I found below the surface level. It can be summed up in one, maybe two words: clay aka clayaeceous. It's not so bad that I'm considering changing my business plan to Old Husher's Mud Bath and Sauna. However, my future need for voluminous amounts of organic debris seems to have increased exponentially by the tractor truck load.

I had a pretty good feeling this was going to happen.

So let's bring on the ploughs, and seed some deep rooting cover crops, and bring up the horse manures from the Parma stables and the coffee grinds from Loop. It's on.

Book Review #2: Market Farming Success by Lynn Byczynski

2010-02-02T09:49:00.003-05:00

Right now, I'm taking a Market Gardener Training Program through the OSU Extension office. Our first textbook is "Market Farming Success" by Lynn Byczynski. After reading the book at a rapid pace akin to a crack binge, I let my thoughts stew a bit. It's been several days now, and I simply love this book.

First, the book is extremely thorough taking the reader through site selection, crop selection, season extension, watering, marketing, etc. Being extremely thorough however, Lynn still knows how to show restraint and resource out the details of this book that would make it cumbersome. For example, Lynn goes to great lengths to extol the virtues of hoophouses, and then provides a website with all the necessary schematics to build a hoophouse. This allows the reader/farmer to focus where the reader/farmer wants to focus. If you can't tell through this example, I'm very interested in hoophouses.

Second, I love the real life examples and stories. These tales come early (like page 1)in the book with profiles of market gardeners along with their respective salaries and acreage. I feel this initial detail is critical because it basically sets the stage for the reader to decide if they want to continue reading the book. Apparently, the micro-farmer can net anywhere between $15K and $50K on acreage of 3.5 acres. That's enough for a house payment in Cleveland.

Third, the book fills in gaps that I personally needed filled in. I know I'm able-bodied, but I still didn't know what kind of acreage standard one person could realistically work without hired help or major agriculture machines. It turns out on average one person is able to work approximately one acre. Another example: I know I'll be needing insurance in the future, but exactly kinds, types, and amounts I wasn't so sure of. Of course, Lynn fills this void and for about $300 a year I can be relatively secure.

If I had to gripe, what would be my gripe? My biggest gripe is that the book is written in 2006-the golden years when everyone's houses were ratcheting up 20%-30% gains and $150 jeans seemed kind of reasonable. However, local food movements have appeared to have gotten stronger, especially here in NE Ohio. So my gripe is more of a concern to consider when planning and budgeting future realistic income.

I totally recommend this book for anyone who wants to start a market garden or farm, or anyone who is at all interested in the aesthetics of the local foods movement.

Where I've Been Lately: Donut Binges and Kitchen Remodel

2010-01-27T12:40:00.004-05:00

An old friend with an updated name, Katherine Wilder, sent me the general, "what have you been up to, haven't seen you blog in while" kind of email last night. And I know I feel like I've been slacking in the blog department. But I assure you, it has not been for a bout of relaxation, but for other whole-hearted pursuits.

As we left off in September, I was hoping to hear about a Federal Stimulus grant that would enable me to start a micro-farm on a piece of land in the city of Cleveland's Land Bank. As October waned and leaves fell, my opportunity to build the soil with tilling, cover crops, and composting also fell due to uncertainties regarding the grant and legal access to the land.

I cover cropped my home plot with rye and hairy vetch, got the oak piles of leaves slow, cold composting in various places in the yard. So, it's November, and I haven't received the grant yet. At this point, I realize that I don't have a backup property, which was the old, "all my eggs in one basket," adage and that kind of freaked me out.

I reminded myself to breath through the nose and decided to add value where I could in this depressed job market and to add another notch to my already amazing repertoire of cooking skills. The value-addition came in the form of a kitchen remodel that I've almost completed: Corian counters, Moen faucet, single bowl sink, water filter, Ikea cabinets, yeah baby. Thanks to Scott, Mike, and Kevin who helped on the kitchen, and foreshadowing aside will be helping on the farm.

As some of you know, I can throw down on cooking, whether it's making Caribbean coconut cabbage curry, tempeh wantons, shoulders jerked or pulled, or ceviche from the top of my head. Obviously, I love food AND variety. Now, it was time to become a donut maker! The inspiration mostly being from necessity and a feature I saw on the travel station or HGTV.

I bought my mini-fryer. Then there was a flurry of about five weeks of donut frying binges. I was trying everything: cake, raised, vegetarian, vegan, chocolate. I was mixing, kneading, rolling, cutting shapes with a pint glass and shot glass, frying, glazing, changing oil, repeat. I was trying any recipe I could find, seeking the perfect donut, when I stumbled on a mighty peculiar donut: a vegetarian sweet potato donut (pictured) with real maple sugar glaze. To double foo-foo the donut, I toasted walnut pieces for a post-glazing dipping. Righteous for sure, and then I upped the ante again by substituting vegan margarine for the butter, thereby frying a vegan donut!

Of course in the midst of this donut frying, kitchen deconstruction/reconstruction, I was awarded the Re-Imagining Cleveland Grant to develop an Urban Market Farm. There were 54 grantees total, receiving this Federal Stimulus money through the city of Cleveland as part of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program. Finally, I got part of the Stimulus Pie.

Now that the kitchen's almost done, I can think/dream/plan/implement my bigger picture: Old Husher's Farm. Right now in addition to the grant, I am taking a "Market Gardener Training" Program. I've had Cleveland artist, Stephe DK, design a graphic that will both serve as my business card and a t-shirt design (pictured). I am working with Loop and Bela Dubby coffee shops to compost their grinds. The to-do list is huge and getting bigger, and I hope to enjoy every minute of it. Anybody got a small tractor?

End of the Season Stuff

2009-09-29T14:04:00.004-04:00

Because some of you are wondering, I still haven't heard from Re-Imagining Cleveland whether or not I was awarded the grant. I've gotten to the anxious point and will be sending some inquisitive emails over the next day. Later on tonight, I'm going to an Info Session on OSU's Master Gardener program. It sounds very textbook-like in its online description. Being that it's taught over the winter months, I'm not sure if there's any kind of garden lab...

Anyways, over the weekend, I took some time and broke down some of the garden. I picked a final 3 pounds of variety peppers (finally some habaneros!), 12 pounds of green tomatoes, and 7 pounds of purple potatoes. Pulling up one of the tomato plants, its roots pulled up dirt from one of the earthworm habitats and with the dirt came three worms. I was stoked with the 7 pounds of purple potatoes as the Yukon Gold yield was small. It wasn't the 15 to 20 pounds described on the Backwoods Home website, but a good-start nonetheless. I think more sun is the answer.

I made an amazing roasted tomato soup over the weekend. I included a picture of the scrumptious process.

Pawpaws to the People! Part 2

2009-09-26T11:47:00.004-04:00

About 2 PM, we finally got to Pawpaw Festival, situated on a pleasant lake just a few miles from Adam's house. Upon entry, you're immediately flanked with booths that have little to do with pawpaws specifically, but a lot to do with the underlying bigger picture, solar displays, solar oven displays, nurseries hawking their wares, the Athens Bicycle Co-Op, and the like. That's cool and all, and I'm down with cause, but I'm wondering where are the pawpaws when midway through the info booths I find this totally choice piece of pawpaw paraphenalia, a pawpaw plushie! See picture. Yet still no real deal pawpaws. Nearing the end of the booths, I felt we were getting closer when we found the Pawpaw Beer Tent. The pawpaw beer, an American wheat style that went perfectly with the low summer sun rays, is a tradition at the Fest. Also making its debut in the Beer Tent was the Ohio Spicebush Golden Ale. However, the Golden Ale was repeatedly trumped by the Pawpaw Wheat and I never even had a taste.

So like Wendy's asking, "where's the beef?" I'm like asking, "where's the pawpaws?" After a quick pint, Sarah and I ditch our guests for the elusive hunt. On the other side of the field where the Beer Tent was located, we finally find them in the form of Chris Chmiel's Integration Acres display booth. Chris is the organizer of the Pawpaw Fest and could be decribed as a Pawpaw Guru. He was selling pawpaws by the pound and some pawpaw flavored ice pops and of course had samples to try.

Across from Chris, the non-profit, Ohio Pawpaw Grower's Association (OPGA) had their booth with informative facts and handouts and lots of varieties of pawpaws to sample. The perhaps father and son team were just calling out cultivars and cutting up the samples, somewhat haphazardly and definitely not scientifically, but it was a quick and dirty way to mill through many of the pawpaw flavor nuances.

And across from OPGA, we found the Official Pawpaw Festival Tent. At the Festival Tent, one could buy t-shirts, try and buy the labeled samples of different pawpaws (my fave was the Susquehanna), and listen to assorted lectures on pawpaws. I went to the Grower's Seminar, given by Ron Powell. I don't believe it was Ron's intention, however, his lecture could have been titled, "101 Problems with Growing Pawpaws," complete with slides of all sorts of caterpillars, other bugs, critters, cows, and natural disasters like windstorms. At least, I know what to look out for when starting my patches.

Meanwhile, Sarah took part in the community yoga practice from Inhale Yoga, and Sarah and Adam hung out with their mountain bike polo friends. In the early evening, the beer tent seemed to have gotten the crowd just riled up enough for some old fashioned square dancing. The crowd being comprised mostly of twenty to forty somethings, looking like natural crossovers between crust punks and hippies with tatts, patches, tie-dyes, suspenders, and meatless boots.

We got out of the Festival around 8 PM. We had had our fill of pawpaws, and Adam and I needed to get a second wind for the Makebelieves rock show at the Union that night. I left determined to plant several small orchards here in Cleveland of this remarkable fruit. I also left with a certain contentedness after experiencing this post-mining New Wave of Appalachia that's looking future-forward to solar not coal and local food, while giving its nods to the old ways like bluegrass and canning.